Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  The Challengers emerged from a close collaboration between the Union Pacific’s veteran general mechanical engineer, Arthur H. Fetters, Jabelmann, and Alco. The general layout of an articulated 4-6-6-4 which could work both high-speed freight and the heaviest passenger trains was laid down by late 1934. What the Union Pacific engineers had learned over the past few years was that it was one thing to build locomotives with a high nominal tractive effort to tackle heavy trains over steep hills, but it was quite another to build engines capable of producing and sustaining high rates of horsepower. It was horsepower that would give the Union Pacific the speed it wanted radically to transform the rate at which it moved heavy traffic through the Midwest and to raise productivity to unprecedented levels.

  The first fifteen Challengers certainly boasted a high tractive effort – 97,400 lb – but were not as powerful as Jabelmann, in particular, wanted them to be. The later engines were modified with new exhaust ports, steam connections, hollow pistons, and lightweight valve gear, all designed to make the locomotives steam easily and freely. To watch one of these powerful engines – 3985 is preserved by the Union Pacific and runs special trains – from a car running parallel to the tracks at 70 mph is a thrilling yet almost perplexing sight; the Challenger’s valve gear seems almost dainty, clicking away like sewing needles, while the locomotive rolls effortlessly and magisterially across the plains. Jabelmann had the wartime locomotive fitted with a new tapered boiler pressed to 280 psi, rather than the earlier 255 psi, a multiple blast-pipe – the ‘pepperbox nozzle’ designed by Leonard Botterton, one of his staff – roller bearings, Boxpok driving wheels, cast-steel frames, improved suspension and lubrication, and bigger, fourteen-wheeled tenders. Still further improvements were made to the last series of Challengers and some coal-burners were fitted with smoke deflectors which made them look even more modern and powerful than they were. On the Union Pacific’s racing ground between Riverside and Los Angeles, these giants were recorded at up to 84 mph.

  Challengers were also built by Alco for other US railroads, although naturally the Union Pacific was the biggest taker, with 105 out of the total of 252 engines built. The Union Pacific locomotives were withdrawn between January 1959 and July 1962. The Challengers had been a fine investment. The Big Boys followed, but the hurried effort to get these 4-8-8-4s out on the road undermined Jabelmann’s health; in June 1941 he suffered a heart attack. In November 1942 he sailed to England as part of the newly formed US Transportation Corps to help with the pressing issue of locomotive maintenance. As no doctor in Omaha, the Union Pacific’s home town, would let him go, Jabelmann took himself off to New York where a doctor gave him the necessary approval. He got to England, but on 6 January 1943 he dropped dead. He left a wife, Teresa Schauer, whom he had married in 1927, and he was missed by Jeffers and by fellow members of the Tangier Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine in Omaha, if not necessarily by some of those who had worked under this demanding and pugnacious man.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary thing, though, about this giant of North American steam has to do with the suggestion made by William W. Kratville in The Challenger Locomotives (1980) that Jabelmann was opposed to the idea of designing the very locomotives that made his name a legend in railway circles. ‘It was Jabelmann,’ Kratville writes, ‘who, despite his affection for steam, had already opted for diesels by the time of the second big Challenger order, but the war prevented the change. It was well known that he would never have supported the new Challengers, Northerns [4-8-4s], or Big Boys because he could already see the diesel’s advantage and he was often referred to as being “ten years ahead of his time”.’

  The diesel locomotive was certainly to push steam from US railroads in a remarkably short space of time. In June 1936, the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors began building diesel-electric locomotives at its new plant at La Grange, Illinois. By May 1952, diesel-electrics outnumbered steam locomotives, and by July 1961 there were no steam engines operating on class 1 US railroads. There were several key reasons for this, as we will discover, yet what is so extraordinary to the steam enthusiast is the way in which this revolution occurred at the very same time as the American steam locomotive itself had reached Olympian levels of power, speed, and endurance.

  There had been a clearly recognizable and self-conscious era of super-power steam, beginning in 1925 when Lima’s revelatory 2-8-4 prototype A-1 took to the rails, and ending with the Big Boys and other mountainous articulated freight engines and the long-distance express passenger engines of the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Lima itself was to build its last steam locomotives – a batch of ten two-cylinder 2-8-4s for the Nickel Plate Road (the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad) – in spring 1949, just a quarter of a century after the famous Ohio works had demonstrated that there was energetic new life to be had from the steam locomotive.

  These twenty-five years were the glory days of North American steam. The size, power, speed, and sheer effect and glamour of the locomotives produced in this period were second to none. But these engineering wonders of the world were to prove short-lived. A comparison might be made between the last great commercial sailing ships – the clippers – or the last generation of piston-engine aircraft – the Britannias and Super-Constellations – and these glorious locomotives: they appeared at the very time that newer technologies were about to supersede them. Even then, perhaps there should have been contingency plans for new generations of US steam locomotives when the political cost and market price of oil disturbed the apparently smooth course of diesel railroading.

  Super-power steam was the invention of William E. Woodard. The term ‘super power’ was the happy invention of Lima’s advertising and public relations consultants. The genesis of A-1 came out of a drive to make the American steam locomotive very much more efficient than it had been to date. The design was intended to save coal in an era of economic uncertainty and the rising power of the United Mine Workers of America, the trade union whose successful efforts to boost its members’ pay and better their working conditions had pushed up the price of coal by leaps and bounds. It was also prompted by a desire to increase the average speed of trains, which, for the most part, was very low across the United States at the very time that the automobile, along with the truck and long-distance bus, was seriously challenging the once indomitable position of the railroads. If the railroads were seen as complacent, it was Woodard’s job to dispel that image.

  Born in Utica, New York, Woodard was educated at Cornell University before joining the Baldwin locomotive works in Philadelphia. He moved on rapidly through Cramp’s Shipyard, also in Philadelphia, and the Dickson Locomotive Works in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before being appointed chief draughtsman at the Schenectady Locomotive Company. This became Alco in 1916, when Woodard left to join Lima, the great Ohio locomotive factory, as vice president in charge of engineering.

  A-1 was the result of progressive development over several years. ‘My vision of the locomotive of the near future,’ said Woodard in a talk to the New York Railway Club in January 1925, ‘is one with a high boiler pressure, cylinders capable of developing from 3,000 to 3,500 hp, with a boiler and fire-box capable of producing an adequate amount of steam for the cylinders in an economic manner. Such locomotives will have larger fire-boxes than we have been accustomed to use. The coal will be burned at a low rate of combustion, to give a higher boiler efficiency. They will have a large gas area through flues and tubes to match the fire-box.’ Evidently, Woodard had learned to see the steam locomotive as more of an organic whole than an assembly of components. This was something that, in France, Chapelon had understood. Here was the leap of the imagination that transformed the steam railway locomotive into a highly effective, very powerful and fast machine in the years leading up to the Second World War.

  The visionary engine that appeared a month later was a 174 ton two-cylinder 2-8-4 – the first of this
wheel arrangement, known as a ‘Berkshire’ – with cast-steel cylinders, a 100 sq ft grate, a high degree of superheating, streamlined internal steam passages, a feedwater heater to maintain a high temperature in the boiler as it was being refilled from the tender, a new type of ash-pan, a booster unit working on the trailing truck adding 13,500 lb to a tractive effort of 69,500 lb, and a host of other improvements. A-1 lived up to its name. It was first put on test on a very demanding 60 mile stretch of the New York Central Railroad between Selkirk and Washington, Massachusetts, in April 1925. On 14 April it was started eastbound from Selkirk at the head of a train of fifty-four freight cars, weighing 2,296 tons, 45 minutes behind one of Woodard’s new H10b 2-8-2s, built by Alco, working a forty-six-car train of 1,691 tons. A-1 gained steadily on the lighter train.

  By Chatham, New York, the two were running side by side. It must have been a thrilling sight. West of Canaan, and now 26 miles from Selkirk, A-1 pulled clear. By the time she stopped at North Adams junction, 20 miles down the line, she was 10 minutes ahead of the 2-8-2. Developing up to 3,675 ihp and 3,385 dbhp, A-1 was clearly a highly potent and markedly efficient machine, and used some 20 per cent less coal and water than the H10b during this test run. The 2-8-4 was subsequently demonstrated on a number of railroads and, from then until the end of steam, the Lima 2-8-4, along with variants built by other companies, became the closest thing to a US standard design.

  The following year, Woodard built ten I1A 2-10-4s for the Texas and Pacific Railway. Making greater use of cast steel and with detailed improvements over A-1, the 4,200 ihp Texas 2-10-4s proved able, on a daily basis at work on the 450 mile Marshall to Big Springs line, to work trains 44 per cent heavier than the company’s existing 2-10-2s, at 33 per cent higher speeds, while consuming 43 per cent less fuel. On the level, they pulled trains of up to seventy freight cars, weighing 2,750 tons, at 50 mph.

  These were extraordinary figures by any standards. In its early days at least, Woodard’s revolution was the American equivalent of Chapelon’s in France in the late 1920s. The difference, though, between the two was in Chapelon’s critical and scientific understanding of steam flow and the importance of a free-flowing exhaust. He calculated that a New York Central Niagara class 4-8-4 and a Pennsylvania Railroad 4-4-4-4 both needed 1,400 ihp simply to create the necessary draught from firebox to smoke-box, because of the strong back-pressure engendered by their restricted exhaust from cylinder through blast-pipe to chimney. With the Chapelon treatment, including a Kylchap exhaust, the French engineer believed a Niagara could have produced 7,800 ihp at 100 mph – well above the 6,600 ihp recorded at 85 mph – with power peaking at 8,090 ihp at 120 mph. If he had been able to get his hands on the Big Boys, Chapelon claimed, he could have increased their power output to 12,000 dbhp with compound drive, a boiler-barrel preheater, and a boiler pressure of 330 psi. With a water-tube boiler pressed to 600 psi, triple-expansion drive, steam jackets, and re-superheating, power could be boosted to 16,000 dbhp. The mind boggles.

  Woodard’s insistence that horsepower was all-important for fast modern trains pushed on a very rapid development of high-speed steam locomotives and trains in the United States in the 1930s. The debut of his 2-8-4 A-1 coincided with the Exposition international des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes held in Paris in 1925. This event gave rise to art deco design and a fresh sense of elegant, luxurious modernity, the new spirit going hand in hand with jazz, streamlining, and the quest for speed. That this should all gel a few years later in the shadow of the Wall Street Crash might seem at first incomprehensible, but the new mood was also an escape into the future. It proved to be very short-lived; no sooner had it gathered momentum than the world was plunged into a savage war.

  Cultural and economic imperatives aside, there were good technical reasons why steam sped up so very dramatically in the 1930s. One of these was the roller bearing. In 1929, after working hard without success to get an American railway to buy these for use on locomotives, the Timken Roller Bearing Company of Canton, Ohio, bought a 4-8-4 from Alco. Over the course of twenty-one months the Four Aces toured thirteen main lines, running a total of 119,600 miles without a single bearing overheating; until then, bearings had been an Achilles heel of the steam locomotive. In Chicago Union station, three young female office workers even pulled Four Aces a few feet along the track. This was no feat of magic: the rolling resistance of a locomotive fitted with roller bearings was 10 oz per ton.

  The first really powerful and potentially very fast express passenger locomotives built in the US were the Hudson 4-6-4s designed by Paul W. Kiefer for the New York Central Railroad. Born in Delaware, Ohio, Kiefer studied at night school at the Cleveland YMCA before attending the Central Institute in Cleveland. Serving an apprenticeship as a machinist with the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway from 1907, he moved on to the New York Central Railroad, where he was the company’s representative at Baldwin and Alco. He was posted to the New York design office, rising to the position of chief motive power engineer in 1926. His first, and immediate, job was to work up the design of a new express passenger engine to take over crack trains on the company’s famous Water Level Route to Chicago. This beautifully aligned and well-maintained line, much of it four-track, ran north from New York’s Grand Central station up the Hudson river to Albany before heading west to Buffalo and along the shores of Lake Erie to Cleveland and through Toledo to Chicago’s La Salle Street station, 960 miles from Manhattan. If the line was ideal for consistently fast running, its loading gauge was more restrictive than on most US railways, so its locomotives were always that bit more compact than their rivals.

  The New York Central’s route to Chicago was in direct competition with the Pennsylvania Railroad, for many decades the biggest of the US railroads and one of the world’s largest business corporations. The ‘Pennsy’s’ route headed south from Manhattan from the railroad’s stunning terminus, a recreation of sorts by the architects McKim Meade and White of the ancient Roman Baths of Caracalla, attached to a magnificent train shed. (The building was foolishly demolished in 1961 and New York has never been able to forgive itself.) It ran on to Philadelphia, where the railway was based, and then west through Harrisburg and Altoona, where the Pennsy built its own engines, to Pittsburgh, Lima and Fort Wayne, and so into Chicago Union station, 903 miles from New York.

  Traffic on these lines was extremely busy, a mix of heavy mineral and fast passenger trains, running through a vast coal belt. By the late 1920s, such was the weight of the new and luxurious trains coming into service that the New York Central’s Pacifics were unable to cope with the demands being placed on them. Looking to Woodard’s work at Lima, Kiefer schemed up a big, two-cylinder 4-6-4. Built by Alco, the first engine was assembled in nine days flat and delivered to the railroad on 14 February 1927. It was felt that this new type of locomotive merited a name. In an interview conducted in 1961 with Alvin F. Staufer, author of numerous books on American steam, Kiefer recalled: ‘I asked Pat [Patrick E. Cowley, the New York Central’s president] if we should name the engine or if he cared about that at all. We were already calling the L class 4-8-2s Mohawks, after the Mohawk Valley and Indians. And then, I’ll never forget that moment. He just looked at me; the sun was shining in from the west, it was late in the day. He swung around in his huge brown leather chair away from me. He stared out of the window for the longest time. He swung back and stared at me, his chin in his hand. Finally he spoke. “Let’s call her the Hudson, after the Hudson river.” I agreed immediately and that’s how it was. The name stuck. It was a natural.’

  Kiefer went on to oversee the design and construction of 275 Hudsons, in three closely related classes, for the New York Central Railroad. The last were the J3a series, elegantly streamlined by the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, who was as well known for his Big Ben alarm clocks for Westclox and vacuum cleaners for Hoover as for the look of ocean liners and trains. The Hudsons were initially fitted with boosters to enable them to start powerfully away from
stops, as 4-6-4s had relatively little weight over their driving wheels for adhesion; they were always best as sprinters. Perhaps a little curiously, and despite the compelling streamlining of the J3a – which was assigned to work the famous long-distance express, the 20th Century Limited, at its zenith in the late 1930s – the New York Central’s line limit was a carefully observed 85 mph. But to average a mile-a-minute, including five stops, from New York to Chicago was still impressive going, especially as a single locomotive ran the entire distance – or nearly the entire distance: the first 33 miles from Grand Central station had been electrified in 1907 when steam was banned from the city.

  On test, the first J1, 5200, was able to sustain 75 mph and 4,300 ihp on the level with twenty-six coaches, weighing 1,700 tons. This made the class 27 per cent more powerful than the Pacifics they replaced, and they ran up to 18,000 miles per month, something few other railway locomotives, anywhere in the world, were asked to do. Kiefer was proving to be an expert in the design of large locomotives that could run hard, far, and fast. The J3a class of 1938, with a higher boiler pressure (275 psi in place of 225 psi) and many detailed improvements, could sustain 4,700 ihp. On test, a J3a was timed at 100 mph on level track with a train of 696 tons.

  When the new-look 20th Century Limited entered service on 15 June 1938, the New York Central had shaped what surely must be the finest long-distance express train of the steam era. There were faster trains, but, from nose to tail, this superb expression of 1930s streamlining was very hard to beat. Its thirteen air-conditioned Pullman cars were painted two-tone grey, as were the Hudsons. They included double-bedded sleeping compartments, more exclusive ‘roomettes’ with private lavatories, a cocktail bar, dining car, barber’s shop, and an observation car complete with a ‘de-luxe suite’ with its own living room, bedroom, and bathroom. Inside, Dreyfuss designed every last detail, from carpets and seat fabrics to napery, crockery, and menus. The last of these, printed in red with a graphic image of a stylised J3a on the cover, offers a Martini cocktail for 40 cents (make mine an Old Fashioned for 10 cents more), genuine Russian caviar on toast for $1.00 and – the most expensive item on a remarkably comprehensive list, complete with a variety of fresh salads and vegetarian options – Lobster Newburg 20th Century, with new wax beans fermière and julienne potatoes, at $2.25.