Ok - so better late than never...

I've been digging through the mound of boxes that contain the remains of the former office in Glendale... finally found what I was looking for.



Wether you see the similarity or not, I can confirm, 100%, that both the Olomana and the Chloe were studied and used by WED as a basis for the FWRR engines. In fact, I can tell you that Jerry Best himself was on hand for the design "research trip" that took place. 4 WED employees ventured to Kimball's house along with a studio van. There, they met Jerry who began to trim tree branches away from the engine stall where both his and Ward's Hawaiian locomotives were stored. Using block and tackle mounted to a railroad tie further up the roadbed, the Chole was the pulled out of the shed cold. Once clear, the Olomana was pulled to daylight as well.

Once accessible, both engines were heavily photographed in detail, many times with engineering scales included for later reference. Of particular interest to WED were the Olomana's petticoat and the Chole's crosshead.

Hope this helps settle the debate.

Hey Western River RR!

Good to see that you still stop by every once in a while.

Thanks for doing some research on the subject. I appreciate it, as I'm sure the rest of us do. While I agree they may have studied the engines in detail, the fact is that the results in the form of the FWRR engines look almost nothing like the Olomana or the Chloe.

And the fact that the two components that seem to have garnered the most interest was the petticoat pipe (a piece of the exhaust system invisible to guests, and something that needed to look the way it does out of practical necessity), and the crosshead (also a mechanical device that had to look a certain way in order to function), says to me they were studying the engine from a mechanical point of view, and that the inspiration for the actual looks of the engine came elsewhere.