Leslie Salt Locomotive

Peterson custom-built several railcars for Leslie Salt's mining operations in the SF Bay Area and Southern California in the late 1940s. "We built a small locomotive for them for their borax operation," explains Peterson engineer Don Stroot (retired '92). "They had a big old six-cylinder engine in there and we came down with this little bitty engine with an automtic transmission. When it arrived, everybody just fell over laughing at the toy we had come up with. On a test run, they gave us a headstart to the mine, since it was an uphill climb. But they weren't laughing when we got to the mine because our machine worked so well."