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 I’ve been into collecting steam whistles for about 8 years but it seems like three lifetimes. When I first got into the hobby I was interested in the historical perspective of whistles, not so much train whistles but whistles in general. My first acquisition was a 4” Buckeye chime that came from the mining country in Colorado and it was followed in rapid succession by a 1.5” Buckeye and a 2” Crane. After that it was a whistle here and a whistle there and a few more here and there and before I knew it they were everywhere.
It wasn’t too long that I had been in to hobby that it occurred to me one day that these whistles were not only shiny and pretty but also functional and were designed to be blown. The only problem was I did not have any way to blow them other than my meager 12 gallon shop air compressor. I learned rather quickly however that while it was possible to make the smaller whistles work with a ¼” air line, that it did not work too well with the bigger whistles like the 4” Buckeye as the cfm requirements were too great for the restricted air line. That problem was resolved fairly easily by taking out the 1” plug on the end of the compressor tank and with a few short pieces of 1” pipe and a few right angle fittings and a ball valve I put together a small manifold with three or four outlets. This sufficed for a while but it was not very portable and besides blowing the whistles inside the garage did not do them justice. Also, I was fairly limited by the size of whistle that I could blow being limited by the size of my small tank. . I was amazed at how quickly a whistle could gobble up 12 gallons of air. As the collection grew I started finding some bigger whistles including some 5” and 6” chimes. Trying to blow them on my little tank set up was, at best, wishful thinking.
One day, on one of my many outing on the back streets and roads of Houston in quest of the elusive last remaining whistle, I came across a plant being torn down and while there did not appear to ever having been a whistle there, there had at one time been an air compressor. The motor and compressor were long gone leaving only the tank. The people that were dismantling the plant said I could have the tank if I would haul it away. It was 250-gallon tank and was a little too big to get into my pickup so I went home and returned with my 16-foot flat bed utility trailer. The dismantling crew helped me load it onto the trailer with a forklift. Externally it was in good shape but not knowing the history of the tank I decided it would be a good idea to hydro-test the tank before putting it into service. This was accomplished at a local company that hydrostatically tests all sorts of pressure vessels for a nominal fee. Once I got the tank home, I discovered a major problem. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. I really didn’t have a place to put it that was esthetically appropriate. Putting it in the garage was not a good idea because it took up a lot of space and blowing the whistles inside didn’t make a lot of sense. Then two neurons fired at the same time and with a stroke of brilliance I decided to leave the tank on the trailer so I could move it around. After a little cleaning and a couple of coats of bright red paint, I through-bolted the legs of the tank to the planking on the trailer and this was the beginning of “Little Toot”. We had accomplished two goals. We were now portable and we had a decent air supply or at least a reservoir.
The next step was to build some type of manifold to put the whistles on.
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