Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  The Pennsy’s experience with Franklin oscillating-cam poppet valves had, though, proved to be remarkably successful when applied to one of the K4 Pacifics, 5399, in 1939 by Vernon Smith under the direction of William Kiesel, the railway’s mechanical engineer, who had been closely involved in the design of the 4-6-2s more than a quarter of a century earlier. The result was a boost in power from around 3,500 ihp to a recorded 4,267 ihp, greater economy, and a higher top speed.

  Before the last of the T1s had been placed in service in 1946, the Pennsy had decided to dieselize its non-electrified routes. By 1948, the Broadway Limited was diesel-hauled and within three years the T1s were redundant. The last was scrapped in 1953. In their brief heyday, these fleet-footed machines, sometimes likened to Bulleid’s controversial Pacifics on England’s Southern Railway, were trusted with fast, long-distance trains and must have been quite a sight streaking along between Crestline and Chicago.

  The 73.1 mph bookings over the 123 miles from Fort Wayne to Gary, and 71.6 mph along the 140.9 miles from Fort Wayne to Englewood, outside Chicago, must have been an easy romp for these 6,500 hp, 100 mph-plus machines. But while the T1s were more than a match for a trio of E7 diesel-electrics in terms of high-speed performance, they were generally less reliable, especially during the very difficult time at the end of the war when servicing and maintenance standards were at a low level. The Pennsy borrowed a Norfolk and Western Railway J class 4-8-4 to see how this altogether simpler, and highly effective, locomotive could work the high-speed Pennsy expresses. The J class kept to time happily with 900 tons and attained 110 mph on easy falling gradients. This was impressive, but the Pennsy considered the 5 ft 10 in driving wheels of the J class to be too small for prolonged high-speed running.

  Ralph Johnson, the Baldwin engineer, had certainly been very proud of the T1s when they first appeared. ‘Many critics of the steam locomotive deplore the fact that it has changed so little in outward appearance,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘This criticism reflects ignorance of both engineering and economic facts, as no type of boiler commercially practicable has been developed which, subjected to the same space limitations, can generate more steam or generate it faster than the internally fired fire-tube boiler . . . however, the steam locomotive has always looked functional, rather than aesthetic, and while this is beautiful to a railroad man it was recognized that the traveling public might prefer the locomotive “dressed up”. Therefore, Mr Raymond Loewy, one of the foremost industrial designers of this day, was retained to “streamline” these new four-cylinder locomotives.’ Johnson added, as if an engineer’s postscript: ‘This styling was not carried out to an extreme as it left accessible all moving parts for inspection.’

  As a last fling, along with the New York Central Railroad Niagaras, for express passenger steam in the United States, the T1s were something of a disappointment. They looked and performed the part, although in everyday service Loewy’s streamlining was more of a hindrance than a help. The engineering of the locomotive’s valves was too complex, especially for the Pennsy’s rather run-down service and maintenance depots at the end of the war. If, however, the T1s had been fitted with boosters and more accessible Franklin type B rotary-cam poppet valves, they may well have been far more successful than they proved to be. Diesels triumphed very quickly on the Pennsy, and in 1945 even Johnson felt moved to write to E. C. Poultney, the author of British Express Locomotive Development (1952): ‘On American roads, the Diesel locomotive sells – not so much on account of its superior thermal efficiency, but because of its superior availability.’

  The diesel’s availability and flexibility in service was recognized early on. This was a severe challenge for steam. As Kiefer wrote: ‘Over the years it has been our increasing determination and practice to advance the design of this type of locomotive, not only to achieve progressively better results with it, but also to enforce ever higher standards for new and competing forms of motive power.’

  These factors were, generally, as true for heavy freight as for express passenger steam. The Union Pacific’s Big Boys were truly magnificent machines, and continued in regular service until 1959, but these were highly specialized machines designed to operate the heaviest of trains over one particular 176 mile stretch of track. It took three new 2,000 hp diesels to perform the work of a single Big Boy, but those same locomotives could run over virtually the entire Union Pacific system, and if they were ever found lacking in power, another 2,000 hp unit could be coupled on to help.

  The mightiest of all US steam freight locomotives, though, were arguably not the Big Boys, but the sixty-eight four-cylinder Allegheny H8 class 2-6-6-6 Mallets designed and built by Lima for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the Virginian Railway from 1941 to 1948. These muscular, yet lithe, machines, covered from smoke-box door to footplate in sand-boxes, brake-pumps, walkways, powerful lamps, and a plethora of ancillary equipment, looked like power stations on rails – although side on they displayed an elegant line –and perhaps this is exactly what these rail-bound leviathans were. Like the Union Pacific Big Boys, the Chesapeake and Ohio H8 Alleghenies, named after the mountain range they were designed to cross with enormous coal trains, were built primarily to work one particular line, although they were soon masters of others. The track for which they were built winds up to Allegheny, and precipitously down again through sharp curves and deep tunnels, between Clifton Forge and Hinton in West Virginia. The distance between the two towns is just 80 miles, but with 144-wagon coal trains, weighing 11,500 tons and with no roller bearings, the going was tough, as it is even for the strongest gangs of diesels today. The trains hauled by the class H8 Alleghenies crossed the summit at about 15 mph.

  The idea had been that the H8s would be able to work this line single-handed with 5,750 tons westbound at speeds of up to 45 mph. In fact, like the Union Pacific Challengers and Big Boys, and the class A 2-6-6-4s of the Norfolk and Western, they proved to be fast engines and free running despite their great mass. They were the heaviest steam locomotives built in the USA, as well as the most powerful in terms of drawbar horsepower, yet they moved with a grace that belied their bulk. With their 5 ft 7 in driving wheels and ample steam-producing capacity, they would run happily up to 60 mph on freight trains, and were timed at 70 mph at the head of troop and hospital trains during the Second World War. Twenty-one H8s were fitted with steam-heating especially to work passenger trains.

  Despite the Chesapeake and Ohio’s original plans, the Allegheny proved to be an extremely powerful mixed-traffic locomotive, and the ultimate realization, perhaps, of Woodard’s super-power steam concept. The railway used them, for the most part, to accelerate slow-moving coal trains on mountain sections, slogging at speeds often down to between 15 and 20 mph. For this kind of traffic the Chesapeake and Ohio was equipped with forty powerful T1 class 2-10-4s, capable of a maximum of 7,000 ihp, built by Lima in 1930. The Alleghenies shone on faster trains, as well as heavy mineral work. They were replaced by diesels from 1952, even though the last went into service in 1948, and the entire class was out of service by the end of 1956.

  The design proposal had been drawn up the Advisory Mechanical Committee, formed in 1929, comprising motive power engineers from four railroads – the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, the Erie Railroad, the Nickel Plate Road, and the Pere Marquette Railway, which was owned by the inseparable Van Sweringen brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James. The key members of the committee in terms of locomotive design were Daniel Ellis, its chairman, A. G. Turnbull, chief mechanical engineer, and M. J. ‘Mitch’ Donovan, who had emigrated to the United States from Scotland, where he had worked at the North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow. Detailed design work at Lima was by chief engineer Bert Townsend and project engineer James Cunningham.

  The Chesapeake and Ohio had been designing and commissioning Mallet articulated locomotives since the H1 class compound 2-6-6-2 of 1910. With war looming and coal trains growing ever heavier, Lima was asked to build the H8 class in 1940. They had 22½ × 33
in cylinders, double blast-pipes and chimneys, and an excellent steam-flow circuit. When the first Allegheny – 1600 – was rolled out from Lima’s works in December 1941, a veteran local journalist invited to the event is supposed to have said: ‘When people have the will to build an engine like this, they’re bound to win a war.’

  The sheer power of the H8s remained unknown, because untested, until 6 August 1943 when 1608 was attached to a 14,075 ton freight train (imagine 400 British Railways Mark 1 carriages coupled together), with a dynamometer car attached, and worked at full power on the Chesapeake and Ohio’s fairly level line between Russell and Columbus in south central Ohio. Working this train at 46 mph, 6108 developed a maximum of 7,498 dbhp, or at least 8,500 ihp. There are just enough recordings of these engines at work to imagine its deep bass exhaust rumbling like rolling thunder through Ohio. During the previous month, 6108, with another H8 banking, had sustained 6,879 dbhp with an 11,505 ton coal train over the Alleghenies on the line for which she was originally designed.

  The power record was a case of friendly rivalry. When 1608 developed a peak of 7,498 dbhp, tears rolled down Daniel Ellis’s cheeks; the Chesapeake and Ohio engine had beaten the neighbouring Norfolk and Western Railway’s superb A class 2-6-6-4, and by some considerable margin (hauling a regular freight train in 1936, one of the new 2-6-6-4s had peaked at 6,300 dbhp, thought to be the US, and world, record at the time). In certain ways, the 347 ton H8s had reached the limit in terms of size for an American steam locomotive; axle loadings had risen to 37.5 tons. Photographs taken during their construction, from 1941 to 1948, show that their boilers only just fitted between the bays of Lima’s erecting shop. Lima lost money on the first batch of $230,663 engines, but made about $75,000 profit on later orders from both the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the Virginian Railway, which bought eight. By 1948, the cost had risen to $248,438 (a New York Central Niagara cost $238,854 in 1946; an 8,000 hp diesel-electric, comprising four 2,000 hp units, would have cost approximately $700,000). Sadly for Lima, this profit was more than offset by the compensation it had to pay the Chesapeake and Ohio when their management discovered that the weight of the H8s was substantially above the 323 tons originally agreed – although the excess weight, which was primarily due to modifications insisted on by the advisory mechanical committee, had caused no damage to the track.

  Spending much of their time working immensely long and heavy mineral trains at relatively low speeds, the fleet-footed Chesapeake and Ohio Alleghenies were scrapped between 1952 and 1956; their Virginian siblings, withdrawn in 1955, were cut up by 1960. Fortunately, two H8s survive – perhaps they will run again one day. A locomotive that could haul a 14,000 ton freight train – well over a mile long – over the Alleghenies could only ever have been a remarkable, almost dream-like, sight. What must it have been like to stand on the steel platform set in front of the smoke-box of one of these giants as it thundered up the steep, winding hills of rural Ohio?

  Here was a railway apparently devoted to steam, and burning the coal that also provided the bulk of its traffic, that switched to diesel late in the day, with the arrival of an anti-steam president, Walter Tuohy, in 1956. The wholesale dieselization of US railways in the 1950s meant that manufacturers and suppliers of very many essential components either went out of business or switched production to meet the needs of the new form of traction. When it built the Alleghenies, for example, Lima had turned to at least fifty outside companies to supply anything from brake-shoes and cylinder cocks to mechanical stokers and smoke-box door hinges.

  Even the Norfolk and Western Railway, one of the few American railways to design and build its own locomotives, and the last all-steam main-line railroad in the USA, was dependent on a host of specialist suppliers to turn drawings into fully operational steam locomotives. When these became unavailable, the railroad had to manufacture its own components, in small batches, at increased cost. Throughout the 1950s, however, the Norfolk and Western ran what was by almost any standards the most impressive and efficient steam locomotive operation in the world. Heavy mineral trains, representing very nearly three quarters of the railway’s traffic, carried coal from the Pocahontas coalfield of West Virginia – one of the largest in the world – to the Midwest in one direction and to the Atlantic coast at Norfolk, Virginia, in the other. However, it also ran an excellent long-distance passenger service from Norfolk over the 677 miles, across the Alleghenies, to Cincinatti. Most remarkably, the great majority of these services – 84 per cent of passenger miles and more than 90 per cent of freight miles in 1955 – came to be worked by just three classes of steam locomotive, all of them powerful, modern, and highly capable. These were the A class four-cylinder 2-6-6-4, the Y-6b class four-cylinder compound 2-8-8-2, and the J class two-cylinder 4-8-4 – three of the finest classes of steam locomotives ever built. In 1955 the steam-powered Norfolk and Western was the most efficient American railway in terms of gross ton miles of freight operated per hour. For a while at least, steam reigned supreme.

  At the railway’s annual staff conference held in April 1951, H. C. Wyatt, the Norfolk and Western’s assistant general superintendent of motive power, explained why the company was holding on to steam:

  Our situation differs from most other roads in two respects. First, we have available along our railroad in almost unlimited quantities, the cheapest known fuel – coal. It is coal of the finest quality for power generation. Second, when other railroads began to turn to other types of power, we already had in service a substantial number of modern coal-burning locomotives. The railroads on which the greatest number of steam locomotives were replaced by other types did not have fleets of steam power as reliable, efficient or as modern as our own Js, As, or Y-6s.

  The quality and character of these highly distinctive locomotives, built at Roanoke, Virginia, between 1936 and 1952 is captured, subliminally, in the elegiac and technically brilliant railway photography of O. Winston Link. Link’s beautiful book Steam, Steel & Stars: America’s Last Steam Railroad (1987) bears comparison with the work of America’s greatest photographers and painters. The black-and-white images, often shot at night with the help of a barrage of flashbulbs, caught a steam-driven world that seemed at once deeply old-fashioned and yet also a dynamic part of 1950s rock-’n-’roll America. One of Link’s most famous photographs, taken in August 1956, shows A class 2-6-6-4 1242 speeding past the Laeger drive-in theatre at the head of a fast late-evening freight train. In the foreground, a young couple sit close together in the front seat of Link’s bulbous 1952 Buick convertible, while on the screen a jet fighter (a Super Sabre?) shoots past. The shot is remarkable not just for its timing – the train passing at the exact moment the jet fighter darted across the silver screen, but because it shows steam powering confidently into the jet age. The two, as the Norfolk and Western proved, did not have to be mutually exclusive.

  Born in Brooklyn, Ogle Winston Link had been a steam enthusiast from earliest childhood. He went on to become a successful technical and commercial photographer, but when in 1955 he discovered that the Norfolk and Western had begun to buy diesels for the very first time, he made visit after visit to the railway to capture its last five years of steam operation. Today, the O. Winston Link Museum is housed in a former railway building in Roanoke, while the nearby Virginia Museum of Transportation is home both to the A class 2-6-6-4 1218 and to 611, one of the semi-streamlined J class 4-8-4s.

  The four-cylinder A class 2-6-6-4, of which forty-three were built, was contemporary with the Union Pacific 4-6-6-4 Challengers. The first engines emerged from Roanoke in May 1936 and the last in April 1950. They were more powerful than their Union Pacific rivals, and, indeed, until the arrival of the Chesapeake and Ohio’s Alleghenies and the Union Pacific Big Boys, they were among the most powerful locomotives in North America, and hence the world. Like the J class 4-8-4s, the 2-6-6-4s were designed in-house by the Norfolk and Western’s mechanical engineers, Russell Henley and John Pilcher. They were intended primarily for fas
t freight services, and could work coal trains of up to 17,000 tons on the more lightly inclined Norfolk to Columbus main line, although their ability to run comfortably at 70 mph and more made them useful as passenger engines, especially during the Second World War, when trains could be very long and exceptionally heavy. The Norfolk and Western claimed that they were able to develop a peak output of 6,300 dbhp, or about 7,700 ihp; in a series of carefully monitored tests made against E7 diesel-electrics in 1952, 5,300 dbhp was sustained.

  The compound Y6b 2-8-8-2 of 1948–52 was the ultimate development of a type of locomotive the Norfolk and Western had been using and improving, from an Association of American Railroads standard design, since 1919. These were engines designed to work coal trains over the mountain sections of the railway. They were massive-looking machines, especially with their huge outside low-pressure cylinders which, measuring no less than 39 × 32 in, looked like giant mechanical bear paws pulling these remarkable engines along. The 2-8-8-2s had a maximum starting tractive effort of 126,831 lb and could produce a sustained 5,500 dbhp at 25 mph, ideal for heavy mineral train operation over steep gradients. They could run at 50 mph when required.

  In 1952, a Norfolk and Western test programme pitting the two classes of articulated freight engines against a General Motors four-unit F7 diesel-electric proved that Henley and Pilcher had created steam locomotives that the diesels were unable to beat conclusively. The results were declared a tie. On the almost-level line between Williamson and Portsmouth, west of Roanoke, the A class 2-6-6-4 ran a marginally heavier train than the four-unit 6,000 hp diesel slightly faster over the 111 miles. By international standards, the performance of the A class was without comparison: the big engine had averaged 31.6 mph with a train weighing 16,028 tons. The 2-8-8-2 was 15 per cent slower than the diesel climbing the 35 miles at 1-in-70 to 1-in-83 from Farm to Bluefield, but its train was 9 per cent heavier.