There are more than a few steam locomotives sitting in parks across Japan, enjoying their retirement.

I wanted to acknowledge the ones I happen across for all their hard work, so I started the Static Life Steam Locomotives Project, SLSL for short.

^{_{A map of the Static Life Steam Locomotives & more about the project is here.}}

Perhaps you remember the C57 in Gyoda city, where it was discovered that some train aficionados had christened this class of locomotive the ladies, for reasons I find ever more unfathomable with each new C57 I see.

Wouldn’t the world be terribly boring though if we all saw things the same way?

This C57 was built in Showa 21, which is 1946 by the Western calendar, making it 75 years old at the time of posting. A little rough around the edges, in need of some TLC and a decent scrub, but otherwise pretty well preserved.

Originally C57-186 was based out of Asahikawa in Hokkaido, where it worked until Showa 49 (1974). I’m not really sure how exactly it ended up down here, in a park in Tokyo with a passenger car attached, but there you go.

The information sign has a lot of technical details; as usual, I have to apologise that, as I’m not much of that kind of train nerd, I don’t know what a lot of the words mean even in English so I pretty much gave up on translating all of it, even with Google’s help.

Points of interest though – total weight when loaded was 68T and unloaded was 61.23T. Tender weight was 18.42T empty and fully loaded, 47.82T.

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You can visit C57-186 here.