One of the more interesting stories about these that my father told was that when he grew up in Tidioute, PA (1910-1928, just up the river from Jamison) the rod-jerker powerhouses were all up and down the Allegheny River valley. You could hear them running day and night. Each lease owner would tinker with the exhaust (which my father called a "barker", like a dog) so that it made some kind of distinctive noise, maybe a whistle, or a metallic clang, or something, so that the lease owners could tell that their wells were still pumping even from a distance, or had shut down unexpectedly. Dad said a typical one was to put a bucket full of holes over the stack so that it both whistled and banged.
The one at Titusville doesn't appear to have any odd sound modifications, but you can certainly tell it could. Once you got it started, the lease maintainers would just go to the next one, a person didn't stick around running this, it just ran until you came back and shut it down. So the 'barking exhaust' you could hear for miles had a purpose.
By the time I grew up in the 60's just about every well was converted over to an electric pump-jack; only the abandoned leases still had this equipment. But you'll still come across old rod lines and oil collection lines in the woods that were never salvaged. The one piece of 'high maintenance' equipment in them was the power belt - which on the ones I've seen was a massive leather belt about 20' long. These things were self-powering and incredibly efficient, but you had a lot of moving parts in comparison to an electric motor pump jack on a timer like today.
Another odd feature was the seat-of-the pants engineering for suspending the rod lines through the woods, most common was the 3-legged triangle made out of used drill pipe, but the neatest ones were the ones that crossed highways - elevated way up in the air. I remember seeing those as a kid and wondered what they were. The big "H" poles on my modules are modeled after the ones at Titusville where they cross an access road. And FYI, yes, I have 23' of N scale clearance under the rod lines for doublestack clearance on T-trak! (That's why the entire well site module had to be elevated above track elevation) And, Ed, the .010 brass rod lines have breakaway hooks AND I'm planning on putting up tell-tales around them made of steel weld wire to remind people they are there for the enthusiastic track cleaners.
