Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  Drinks and dinner were served as the express cruised smoothly at the line limit, speedometers glowing from the carriage walls. As dusk fell, the locomotive’s disc wheels were lit from inside the frames, casting a glow – beautiful in winter – around the train. After dinner, the dining car became a bar where swing and jazz were played from gramophones. Meanwhile, engaging advertising – always with the locomotives on show – stressed both comfort and glamour. The very first adverts posted in New York in 1938 boasted: ‘It’s Century time! A moment ago, outside the station, you were in the heart of a great city, with crowds, blaring taxis, newsboys shouting the evening headlines. Now you’re in a different world as you follow that crimson carpet down the platform at Grand Central Terminal toward the softly lighted, streamlined cars that will be your club on wheels for tonight.’ As for who else might be on the train, the advert was equally enticing: ‘There is a fascination about your “dinner of the century”. For nearby may be a face you last saw in Technicolor, or one that would be news on any financial page.’

  With the 20th Century Limited, the New York Central had proved that steam could indeed enjoy a new image. Diesels nudged their oily way into service on the 20th Century Limited from 1945, although at that time the train might just as commonly be hauled by a Hudson or one of Kiefer’s latest Niagara 4-8-4s as by a pair of new Electro-Motive E7 diesel units. In 1945 the J3a locomotives lost the last of their streamline casings, even though these had been carefully designed to allow easy access to pistons and valve gear; they were easy to spot, however, by their striking Scullin double-disc or Boxpok wheels.

  For sheer speed, the rival Pennsylvania Railroad was always faster than the New York Central. In fact, the high average speeds maintained by even some of its veteran engines in the late 1930s were positively eye-opening. In 1938, Donald Steffee recorded a run on the Chicago Arrow, a fast, light train from Detroit. The five-car, 350 ton train was worked by 1649, one of eighty-three two-cylinder E6 Atlantics designed by Alfred W. Gibbs, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s chief mechanical engineer, and built between 1910 and 1914. The 125 ton locomotive ran the 140.9 mile section between Fort Wayne and Englewood, outside Chicago, in 113 minutes and 5 seconds – 2 minutes ahead of a very tight schedule – at an average speed of 74.3 mph, with a maximum of 93 mph.

  As a vehicle, the steam locomotive is well suited to high-speed running. From 29 May 1935, anyone travelling from Chicago to the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, by the brand-new Hiawatha streamlined express of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad – known as the Milwaukee Road – discovered just how fast steam trains could be. Here was the world’s first steam train designed to cruise at 100 mph, backed by a brilliant advertising campaign – ‘The Milwaukee Road presents the first of the Speedliners’ – by Chicago’s Roche, Williams & Cunnyngham.

  The Milwaukee Road competed for passenger traffic between Chicago and the Twin Cities with two other first-class railways, the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. Inevitably, there was an intense rivalry among the three, although a gentleman’s agreement kept their schedules in tandem until the Milwaukee Road suddenly increased the running speed of its Hiawathas to 105 mph and introducing a sixty-minute schedule for the 85.6 miles between Chicago and Milwaukee.

  On 2 January 1935, the Chicago and North Western introduced its 400 service, a train designed to run the 400 miles between Chicago and the Twin Cities in 400 minutes. At first the service was a little bit slower than over the Milwaukee Road’s 408 miles, but in May a 6½ hour schedule was in force, maintained by four E2-a Pacifics, upgrades of a batch of ten engines built by Alco in 1923. Bereft of streamlining they may have been, yet these veterans could certainly move. In autumn 1935, one of the four is said to have run the 85 miles from Milwaukee to Chicago in 65 minutes, reaching 108 mph in the process. It may well have done.

  On 21 April 1935, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy’s Twin Cities Zephyr pulled out of Chicago for the first time on its 427 mile route to the Twin Cities. This three-car, shot-welded, and streamlined stainless-steel diesel service was allowed six hours for the run, at an average speed of 71 mph. The pioneer Zephyr built the previous year by the Budd Company had already been timed at 112.5 mph. New sixcar trains followed in 1936.

  The Milwaukee Road had a lot to live up to. Its Hiawathas, though, were fleet of foot from the word go. On 15 May, on a trial run from Milwaukee to New Lisbon, with engineer Donahue at the controls of the new streamlined Atlantic No. 1, the train was run up to 112.5 mph. A special preview trip for 250 members of the Chicago Traffic Club saw the mercurial 4-4-2 holding a speed of 106 to 108 mph for twenty miles between Deerfield and Playfair, Illinois, on its way back to Chicago. The first grey, maroon, and orange service trains ran like clockwork and were extremely popular with the public; on 14 July, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about the crowds gathered at wayside crossings to watch the Hiawatha steam through in a blur of whirring rods. It was headlined ‘Throngs Thrilled Nightly as Rail Flyer Races By’. Adverts for the new train taken out in newspapers roared: ‘A silver and orange flash . . . America’s first completely streamlined super-speed steam locomotive. Designed and built especially for the Hiawatha. Nothing faster on rails.’ They also claimed that the oil-burning locomotive ‘cruises easily at 100 miles per hour and is capable of a top speed of two miles a minute’. Was it?

  The Hiawatha Atlantics, and indeed the trains themselves, were designed and built very quickly. The Milwaukee Road needed a simple and reliable locomotive that could run at very high speed without the expense of upgrading signalling and track. Its mechanical engineer, Charles H. Bilty, who had started out with the Milwaukee Road as an apprentice machinist in 1893 and stuck with it until he retired in 1943, had been very impressed by the fast running of the Pennsy’s E6 Atlantics. He was happy with what seemed like an antiquated wheel arrangement – the 4-4-2 – because he wanted a light and fast engine for light and fast trains. The Hiawatha Atlantics would be expected to do nothing more than fly along with seven-car streamliners; they would haul no stopping passenger trains and certainly no freight trains.

  Working with Alco, Bilty configured the new 125 ton, two-cylinder A class Atlantics – the first in the USA for twenty years – which featured high-pressure boilers (300 psi), roller bearings, Boxpok wheels, lightweight valve gear and coupling rods, and 7 ft 0 in driving wheels. Cylinders were 19 × 28 in and tractive effort was 30,700 lb. The streamline casing was partly the product of wind-tunnel tests carried out at New York University and partly a matter of style. Somewhere in the development of the Hiawatha, Otto Kuhler, the German-born industrial artist, worked his way into the Milwaukee Road’s design team. Already working as an advertising consultant to Alco, Kuhler was to become an important part of the Hiawatha as the train grew in size and needed new locomotives and carriages within just sixteen months of its launch.

  In practice, the A class Atlantics proved to be very fast. They needed to be. Aside from its five intermediate stops, some extended because of the need to take on water, the Hiawatha was faced with no fewer than fifty-eight service restrictions on its 410.1 mile run, twenty-three of them demanding that the train slow to below 60 mph. On a typical trip, recorded by Baron Vuillet on 15 June 1937, A1 No. 4, with 415 tons in tow, gained 24.5 minutes against the schedule, running at up to 106 mph, and running freely on the level at 100 mph with full regulator and 28 per cent cut-off. Vuillet described the trip as ‘mainly a series of extremely energetic recoveries from slacks’, with No. 4 demonstrating formidable acceleration at speeds above 60 mph. Throughout the journey, full pressure was maintained. ‘The locomotive rode remarkably well,’ Vuillet noted. ‘At 96 mph I wrote my notes conveniently standing up and not leaning against anything. At 106 mph I took them quite comfortably, sitting down.’

  The Milwaukee Road’s track was excellent, with canted curves designed to be taken at a theoretical maximum of 116 mph. In a throwaway line i
n his Railway Reminiscences of Three Continents, Vuillet says: ‘When tested on practically level track, a maximum speed of 125 mph was reached with six cars (310 tons).’ It is hard to know for certain just how fast these well-balanced, two-cylinder locomotives were. They were rated at a maximum 3,450 ihp at 60 mph, tailing off to 2,700 ihp at 100 mph. Given that the braking distance of the Hiawathas was nearly two miles from 100 mph, perhaps no one was ever willing to go faster than the officially credited 112.5 mph. But, with a train as light as that of Mallard or the German 05 002, in proportion to the weight of the locomotive, it seems very likely that a Class A Atlantic could have topped 120 mph comfortably.

  In August 1938, the Hiawatha Atlantics were replaced by much bigger two-cylinder F7 class Hudsons. The Hiawatha was now to be a heavier and even faster train, while the four A class engines were used to accelerate services elsewhere on the Milwaukee Road; they were withdrawn and scrapped in 1950–1. Six elegant class F7 4-6-4s were built by Alco, with design input from Bilty and his team, and styled by Kuhler; they even carried plates bearing the legend ‘Speedlined by Kuhler’. The 153 ton locomotives boasted 23.5 × 30 in cylinders, 7 ft 0 in driving wheels, a 96.5 sq ft grate, and a boiler pressure of 300 psi. Tractive effort was 50,294 lb. Much use was made of steel casting, welding, roller bearings, and thermic siphons – two of them – to ensure a robust, easy-steaming, and free-running engine. The scale and power of these engines made the Hiawatha expresses a relatively easy proposition, compared with hauling heavy passenger trains. The coal-fired Hudsons, however, were designed to work all major Milwaukee Road expresses, no matter what the load; in this respect they were quite different machines from the Atlantics, which were custom-built for the lightweight streamliners.

  In practice, the F7s could maintain the newly accelerated Hiawatha schedules with up to sixteen lightweight cars and run fast with twenty-car trains of standard heavy American passenger stock. During 1943, with a Hiawatha made up to the full sixteen cars, weighing 780 tons, an F7 ran the 85.6 miles from Milwaukee to Chicago in 63 minutes. The first 12 miles were covered in 12 minutes; the following 60 miles were reeled off in 37 minutes, at an average of 100.7 mph, with speed held between 99.5 and 102.5 mph. It was because such running was achieved so readily, and with low maintenance costs, that the Milwaukee Road proposed a sixty-minute schedule for the 85.6 miles between Chicago and Milwaukee – it could have been done, day in, day out. The Milwaukee Road’s fastest schedule was the Morning Hiawatha taking 58 minutes for the 78.3 miles from Sparta to Portage, at 81 mph. It was the fastest steam timetable in the world, and it was never beaten.

  One of these runs, the eastbound Morning Hiawatha, was timed by Eric Crickmay in 1940 with F7 No. 100 hauling a nine-coach train, weighing 465 tons (the equivalent in locomotive-to-train weight of an LNER A4 in charge of the King’s Cross to Edinburgh Coronation streamliner). The Sparta to Portage section was run nicely on time, as was the entire journey with its seven intermediate stops and lightning acceleration away from each. The first 13 miles out of Sparta were allowed 12 minutes, despite a 9.75 mile climb away from the station at between 1-in-150 and 1-in-200, and two restrictions to 40 mph, but the F7 charged up this gradient at 80 to 82 mph. The pace and power were phenomenal. Crickway was further rewarded on his journey with three separate spells of sustained running at over 100 mph.

  Rather frustratingly, Baron Vuillet had this to say of the maximum speed potential of the F7s: ‘The load of the Hiawatha was at first increased to twelve cars (550 tons) but with such a load it was found that “the schedules were not fast enough to bring out the best performance of the engines”. After accelerating to 105 mph . . . 25 per cent cut-off was sufficient for maintaining the required speed. With very little effort 120 mph was averaged for 4.5 miles on practically level track, the maximum speed being 125 mph.’ Although we are never likely to know just how fast the Milwaukee Road Hudsons were, what we can be certain of is that these truly brilliant locomotives ran every day at between 100 and 110 mph; there is nothing in the annals of steam to compare with this marathon. Today, it is hard to imagine quite what it must have been like seventy years ago to stand by an ungated crossing somewhere out in the sticks watching one of these streamliners howl by. It seems sad that the steam Hiawathas were so short-lived; diesels made their appearance in 1951, the year that the last of the six Hudsons (or Baltics as Bilty insisted on calling them) was withdrawn. No Milwaukee Road streamliners were preserved.

  As to just how fast an American steam locomotive ran, the jury is out and will probably remain so. Claims as wild as the West itself were very much a part of US railway lore, yet because few high-speed trains, even by the late 1930s, were accompanied by a dynamometer car, they could never be proved scientifically. It is just possible, though, that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s unique four-cylinder S1 6-4-4-6, a duplex locomotive – two sets of cylinders and running gear mounted one behind the other underneath the boiler – built at the company’s Altoona plant in 1939 for the New York World’s Fair, may have outpaced an F7. Streamlined by Raymond Loewy, 6100 was the largest and, at 140 feet, certainly the longest passenger locomotive ever built. She was very powerful – about 7,000 ihp – and rode well, but because of her great size was restricted to the Pennsy mainline between Chicago and Crestline, Ohio. She was often seen at the head of such crack Chicago to New York trains as the General, the Trailblazer, and the Broadway Limited. In its December 1941 issue, Popular Mechanics claimed 133.4 mph for 6100 over this route. In March 1946, it was said to have topped 141 mph, and there were even claims of 156 mph. And what about 120 mph on the level with 1,600 tons? This would have demanded a far greater power output – something like 10,500 ihp – than the S1 was capable of. But, as the S1 was taken out of service in 1945 and scrapped four years later, all these claims remain the stuff of railway legend and superheated debate among steam enthusiasts.

  More important than sheer speed in the late 1930s was the development of high speed and great power produced consistently over long runs. The work of Kiefer on the New York Central Railroad and of Jabelmann working with Alco resulted in some of the greatest of all US steam locomotives. Among these were the engines that met the new General Motors and General Electric diesels head-on in the aftermath of the Second World War. These were complemented by the controversial T-1 duplex locomotives built under the direction of William Kiesel at Altoona for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Norfolk and Western Railway’s superb J class 4-8-4s.

  The 4-8-4s, of which more than nine hundred were built by and for thirty-one US railroads, became the ultimate expression of super-power steam. This wheel arrangement offered a four-wheel leading truck for good riding at speed, eight driving wheels for traction, and a four-wheel trailing truck over which was slung a very large and deep fire-box, heating a very large boiler. The very first 4-8-4s were a batch of twelve for the Northern Pacific Railway – skirting the Canadian border from the Great Lakes to the Pacific – built by Alco in 1926–7. These locomotives gave their name to the type: Northerns. The Northern was developed steadily through the 1930s and during the Second World War.

  The biggest American 4-8-4 was built by Baldwin at its Philadelphia works in three batches between 1938 and 1944 for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, known as the Santa Fe. The engineer in chief at Baldwin was Ralph P. Johnson, author of The Steam Locomotive: Its Theory, Operation and Economics (1942). These 228 ton engines worked the heavy Santa Fe sleeping-car expresses from Chicago to San Francisco and Los Angeles west of La Junta, Colorado. This was difficult territory for trains of any sort, up and down through the see-saw mountain ranges of the continental divide and blazing deserts where there was precious little water. The gradients were so trying – up to 1-in-28.5 – that the Santa Fe’s diesel streamliners sometimes had to be helped up them by the 4-8-4s; this must have been a wonderfully incongruous sight.

  The Santa Fe 3765 class Northerns were oil-burners, equipped with 55 foot tenders which alone weighed 201.5 tons. They ran vast mi
leages. Arriving at Los Angeles after a through trip from La Junta – 1,234 miles – or even from Kansas City – 1,788 miles – they could be turned around in six hours and sent back east. Remarkably, given the long mountain gradients they had to climb, the Santa Fe Northerns were fitted with 6 ft 8 in driving wheels. But with 28 × 32 in cylinders, and boilers with a diameter of 8 ft 6 in pressed to 300 psi, they had a tractive effort of 66,000 lb and could sustain 5,500 ihp. They could also run at 100 mph wherever permitted by the track alignment or the railway’s civil engineer. They certainly reached this speed on the 22 mile 1-in-91 downhill stretch west of Kingman on the 148.7 mile descent from Seligman, Arizona, to Needles, California, in the Mojave Desert.

  The Northerns had to climb back the other way, of course, but they were outstanding hill-climbers. Cecil J. Allen cited a run with the westbound Chief express from Los Angeles with 3777 at the head of a fourteen-car train, weighing 780 tons. The 4-8-4 surmounted the 31 miles and 2,100 foot difference in altitude from Needles to Goffs ‘with speed never once falling below 43½ mph, even up continuous 1-in-67 inclines’.