Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  It was said that the Norfolk and Western had tuned up its test steam locomotives with a higher than usual boiler pressure (315 psi) and bored out cylinders to boost power; equally, it was claimed that General Motors had tweaked the four-unit diesel to give 7,000 hp. The 2-8-8-2 on test had certainly been ‘supercharged’ recently, using a booster valve to supply superheated steam at reduced pressure into the low-pressure cylinders during compound working – such was the ability of these engines’ boilers to generate steam. In fact, Norfolk and Western steam did so well in these tests that its steam men liked to say that it had dieselized without diesels. In strictly commercial terms, the steam-driven Norfolk and Western Railway was also a success: it paid a dividend to shareholders of 6 per cent in the mid-1950s, compared to the 0.5 per cent paid by the fully electrified and dieselized Pennsylvania Railroad.

  Not only were the new steam locomotives powerful and efficient, they were also backed up by modern servicing facilities, located in purpose-built depots at Shaffers Crossing (Roanoke), Bluefield, Williamson, and Portsmouth. Engines passing through brightly lit ‘lubritoriums’ were oiled and, if necessary, adjustments could be made very quickly. Even after the longest, hardest run, a large Mallet could be turned around in ninety minutes. The streamlined 4-8-4s could also be cleaned very easily, passing through automatic washes with spinning brushes and being hosed down by water-jets, just like a diesel or electric locomotive today. Photographs and films show that these depots employed modern, Bauhaus-style architecture and were exceptionally clean. The looks of the J class 4-8-4, new from Roanoke in October 1940, were a perfect match for these mechanized depots and the idea of fast, clean, and efficient steam trains that they promised.

  The J class streamliners were a truly remarkable design for a railroad that had been, in terms of publicity and speed, somewhat out of the picture when compared with the Pennsy, the New York Central Railroad, the Southern Railway, the Milwaukee Road, or the Union Pacific. Here, though, was one of the most powerful of the American 4-8-4s, and possibly the fastest on record despite the locomotives’ small 5 ft 10 in driving wheels. Designed and built at Roanoke under the direction of Russell G. Henley, the Js were beautifully streamlined, not by an industrial design consultant, but by Frank Noel, a foreman at Roanoke whose speciality was the construction of passenger cars. The first locomotive, attached to six new passenger cars, was packed off on a publicity tour of the railway on 24 October 1941. Finished in Indian red and gold over glossy black, 600 made a magnificent sight.

  The J class engines weighed 220 tons. Their two cylinders measured 27 × 32 in. Boiler pressure was 275 psi and tractive effort 73,300 lb. Following performance tests made by the Norfolk and Western in 1945, these figures were raised to 300 psi and 80,000 lb. With 300 psi boiler pressure, 604 developed 5,100 dhbp at 40 mph. Their great power was a real boon to the Norfolk and Western during the war years, when the number of annual passenger journeys rose from 1,047,732 in 1939 to 5,168,580 in 1945. This figure was to fall rapidly in post-war years, as troop trains all but vanished and the new interstate freeways and inter-city air routes began to take their toll on railway traffic.

  The locomotives were built in three batches: five streamlined engines in 1941–2, five without streamlining in 1943, and a final four with streamline casing in 1950, although all ran in streamlined guise after the war. The 600 series were much faster than rivals had imagined; on loan to the Pennsy in 1944–5, 610 ran at 110 mph on the track between Crestline, Fort Wayne, and Chicago. Typical work for a J class engine on the Norfolk and Western included running the heavy Cavalier passenger train just over 200 hilly miles from Roanoke to Williamson, calling at nineteen stations on the way and averaging 30.5 mph in the process. Even the crack Powhattan Arrow, a fine-looking train composed of Tuscan red streamlined Pullman stock and launched in April 1946, averaged no more than 43 mph on its epic run from Norfolk to Cincinatti; however, the train made fifteen regular and two conditional stops, including five over the last 111.6 miles from Portsmouth to Cincinatti. What Norfolk and Western timetables hid – except to railwaymen and steam enthusiasts – was the vigorous acceleration required between stations over a challenging route; the power of the J class was never wasted.

  More than speed, reliability was all-important, and the 600s were extremely reliable, racking up an average of 15,000 miles per month, despite moderate train speeds. They were comfortable engines to work on. With their neat, chrome-ringed instruments, well-placed controls, and general air of refinement, the J class was popular with the crews who worked them on trains like the Powhattan Arrow, up, down, and around the curves of a demanding main line which could be very challenging indeed in winter. Mechanical lubrication was provided to 220 points on the locomotive and tender, while a further seventy-two were lubricated using high-pressure hoses in the railroad’s ‘lubritoriums’.

  In every respect – appearance, speed, power, comfort, utilization, and reliability – the J class 4-8-4s were among the very finest of all steam locomotives. Their end, and the finale for Norfolk and Western steam, came unexpectedly. On 1 April 1958, Stuart T. Saunders, a Virginia-born, Harvard-educated lawyer, took over from the veteran Robert ‘Racehorse’ Smith as president of the Norfolk and Western Railway. Whereas Smith, a man who had begun his working life on the railroad as a member of a permanent-way gang, and whose long, fast, striding walk earned him his nickname, believed very much in steam for the principal trunk routes, Saunders plumped for complete dieselization almost as soon as he assumed office. A man who did not mix with railroad staff, Saunders settled on 1 January 1960 as the first day of an all-diesel Norfolk and Western. The change from one form of highly successful traction to another was expedited at a faster rate than on any other class 1 US railroad, with a speed that left many working on the railway rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

  Saunders hated what he thought of as ‘dirty’ steam locomotives. He swung into action with a zeal that would have impressed the puritan iconoclasts of seventeenth-century England. A Norfolk and Western passenger train timetable issued on 15 June 1958 featured a J class on its cover, set between profiles of two Native Americans; a new timetable published on 26 October depicted the Native Americans, but not the steam locomotive. The June timetable had clearly been at the printers, or already printed, before the announcement, made on 2 June, to the effect that the Norfolk and Western Railway was buying 268 diesel units to replace steam locomotive working entirely. So keen was Saunders to rid the railway of steam that he hired diesels from other companies and was content to see six- and seven-year-old mainline locomotives scrapped.

  The subsequent cull was draconian. The last of the J class to run was 611, on 24 October 1959. Only a week before, on an excursion from Petersburg to Norfolk, 611 was said to have run up to 100 mph between Poe and Suffolk; sadly, there appears to be no record of the run. Given that a J could run at three-figure speeds on its home railway, logs of everyday runs demonstrating their power and acceleration over the Virginia hills would be riveting stuff. The A class 2-6-6-4 went the same year, while the last of the Y6bs soldiered on until 6 May 1960. Between June 1956 and May 1960, 233 modern Norfolk and Western steam locomotives, including all of the A, J, and Y6b classes, as well as seventy-five 0-8-0 switchers, some just five years old, were taken out of service.

  While it was glorious to witness 611 back in steam on the Norfolk and Western – it ran special trains from 1982 to 1994, along with A class 2-6-6-4 1218 (from 1987) – and the 4-8-4 still looked sleekly modern and was clearly immensely powerful, her last run in regular service represented the final curtain for regular main-line steam in the United States. In fact, that curtain had fallen very quickly indeed on the Norfolk and Western, which, ironically, had by most measures been the finest of all North American steam railways. Given the astonishing power, speed, and overall operating efficiency of the last generation of American super-power steam, just why did this form of traction fall from commercial grace so very quickly? The reasons are not entirely
obvious, yet together they must have added up to a convincing case as far as railway management was concerned.

  *

  The universality of the diesel-electric locomotive was quick to impress management, whether at an operational or commercial level. Whereas steam locomotives tended to be specialist machines – express passenger, heavy freight, shunting, and so on – diesel units could be coupled together in series, with only their final drive ratios varied to meet different requirements, so that any steam locomotive, no matter how powerful, could be challenged, equalled, and bettered. A single diesel unit might spend some time shunting or working local passenger and freight traffic; coupled together, a pair could haul an express train on most lines to exacting schedules. Because they were light on their wheels and caused no ‘hammer blow’ on the tracks, as steam locomotives did with their powerful piston thrusts and heavy running gear, diesels were popular with the railroads’ civil engineers. They were easy to turn around at the end of long runs, clean compared to steam locomotives, and with their excellent acceleration from rest they could outpace most, if not all, contemporary steam locomotives on journeys with frequent stops.

  The list could go on, and yet as the tests conducted by Kiefer on the New York Central Railroad in 1946 and Henley on the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1952 had proved, it was a close-run thing in terms of annual operating costs between the best of modern main-line steam and the latest diesels. And, given that a number of railroads sat on vast reserves of high-quality coal – especially those in the east of the country – it must have been sensible to burn coal rather than to use diesel oil. There were, of course, railroads operating in the parched and coal-less south-western states that had long had a problem with fuel and, especially, water supplies for steam locomotives. But the real reasons for the speed of dieselization lay elsewhere.

  In late 1945, Joseph Ennis, a senior vice president of Alco, stated categorically that ‘the future holds an expanding role for . . . the steam locomotive’. Yet Alco built its last steam locomotive in 1948. The company was out of business twenty-one years later, after building many diesel-electrics jointly with General Motors, by which time its old rivals Baldwin and Lima were history too. In an illuminating essay, ‘Corporate Culture and Marketing in the American Railway Locomotive Industry’, published in Business History Review in June 1995, Albert Churella, a senior lecturer at the Ohio State University, identified some of the key reasons why steam was banished with such astonishing pace in the United States.

  Churella stresses the yawning gap in terms of corporate culture between steam locomotive makers like Alco and what were to be the two giants of the US, and global, diesel locomotive industry, General Electric and General Motors. Taking their cue from the automotive industry, the newcomers used marketing as a tool and sold their wares direct to commercial railway management, rather than to operating and mechanical engineering management. Where the steam manufacturers were essentially craft-based and worked closely with railroad engineers and committed steam men, General Electric and General Motors were modern business corporations. They assembled cost-effective products, marketed them vigorously, and talked directly to the men whose main concern was profit and loss, not boiler pressures, cylinder diameters, and indicated horsepower.

  ‘The inability of Alco executives to adapt their corporate culture to fit the emerging diesel locomotive market,’ wrote Churella, ‘had a dramatic effect. In 1917 Alco was the 52nd largest industrial corporation in the United States. By 1948, its ranking had fallen to 145th, and it continued to decline in the years that followed. With only two exceptions, Great Western Sugar and Willys-Overland, no industrial corporation in the history of American business fell so far so fast.’

  Alco’s senior management were steam men through and through. Although the company could have muscled in on the burgeoning diesel market early on, it chose not to. Significantly, Robert B. McColl, elected Alco president in December 1945, had begun his career in England with Robert Stephenson and Company. In many ways, these executives were far from competitive, with Alco, Baldwin, and Lima sharing working drawings and components with one another.

  The diesel manufacturers, though, were creatures of the market and marketing, allied with first-rate design and production engineering. They offered easy-payment hire-purchase deals and extensive after-sales service. They ran courses to train US railroad workers in the ways of the new diesels. In May 1947, General Motors sent a diesel ‘Train of the Future’ off on a six-month tour of the USA to woo the travelling public. Booklets and advertising ensured that the American public was persuaded of the virtues of clean – or what appeared to be clean – new diesels. An advertising campaign pursued between 1957 and 1959 saw General Motors place colour portraits of ‘Men who build the future of American railroads’ on the covers of Railway Age, the leading industry journal. These men of the future were, of course, General Motors’ customers; the implication was that railway executives stuck in a black-and-white world of steam were a throwback to a grimy past.

  There had been no conspiracy, no special lobby that had got one over steam in Washington, DC, or anywhere else. But the diesel industry was young, fuelled as much by new business management techniques as by oil, and a rapier in terms of sales and marketing to the steam industry’s broadsword. The figures tell an astonishing success story. Although some railroads like the Norfolk and Western continued to build new steam locomotives for some years to come, order books at Alco, Baldwin, and Lima were empty by 1946. In 1945, diesels worked just 8 per cent of all passenger train miles; the figure was 34 per cent three years later. There were 3,882 diesels in service with US railroads at the end of 1945; there were 20,604 by the end of 1952, and nearly 28,000 by the time the Norfolk and Western’s last Y6b ran in May 1960.

  The end of main-line steam in the USA was caused as much by new business methods and new ways of seeing the world and how to get about it, as by new technology. It was not that the US steam locomotive at its best had been anything other than a magnificent machine, but its development in the 1940s was no match for the business proposition made to railway executives by General Motors. In 1945, orders had been coming in for some of the most impressive steam locomotives ever built; Alco was busy with Kiefer’s Niagaras and Lima with the Allegheny 2-6-6-6 Mallets. It must have been difficult in those crucial years of the diesel-electric’s takeover of the market for steam manufacturers to see the writing on the wall; they were making superb machines.

  As late as February 1949, Lima prepared an advertisement to send out to US railroads for its latest design – by A. J. ‘Bert’ Townsend – for a fast freight 4-8-6 with all the modifications it thought necessary for this powerful engine to compete with diesels. The question of acceleration away from rest had been addressed with a new type of high-speed booster which would have provided increased tractive effort at speeds of up to 35 mph, the crucial speed at which the power characteristics of the steam locomotive begin to make themselves felt over and above diesels of the same nominal output. ‘To get more power with less coal – investigate this new design.’ But coal itself was being ousted by oil on the railways, and the project was dropped just two months later. Evidently heartbroken, Townsend resigned and died the following year. Significantly perhaps, the very last steam locomotives built by Lima were two-cylinder 2-8-4s for the Nickel Plate Road – the last descendants of Woodard’s original and revolutionary super-power A-1 2-8-4 of a quarter of a century before.

  With locomotives like the Chesapeake and Ohio Alleghenies and Union Pacific Big Boys, American steam had reached a limit in terms of sheer scale. Steam-cycle efficiency, however, was another thing, and while American steam engineers had shaped some of the most impressive, expressive, and memorable of all man-made machines, their development had reached an impasse. If the diesel lobby had not been so persuasive, might US steam have moved on again? It is hard to know, and yet Chapelon’s firm belief that a Big Boy could be reworked to become much more efficient offered only a hint of ho
w American steam might have developed from the 1950s onwards. Few in the 1930s truly understood just how troublesome the politics of oil would be in the years to come; the true cost of the diesel would be very high indeed.

  CHAPTER 5

  AROUND THE WORLD

  Red Stars, Southern Lights, and Eastern Promise

  The steam locomotive is not just the most expressive machine yet invented, but in many cases a work of art. Engineering art, yes, but art all the same. In France, André Chapelon worked with the artist Émile André Schefer on the styling of his later locomotives, while in Czechoslovakia, Vilém Kreibich collaborated with Vlastimil Mareš, a distinguished steam locomotive engineer who rose to become director of the machinery department at the ministry of railways in Prague. The working partnership between artist and engineer was to produce some of the finest and best-looking of all modern steam locomotives, while the story of late-flowering Czech steam was a remarkable one.

  For a very brief period – between 1945 and 1948, when the Iron Curtain fell across Europe – Mareš worked closely with Chapelon, who had been appointed consultant locomotive engineer to the ČSD (Czech State Railways). Although just five 476.0 class three-cylinder compounds were built in 1949–50, Chapelon’s influence could be seen in several other of Mareš’s designs. These included the 475.1 class two-cylinder 4-8-2s (1947–55), the 498.1 class three-cylinder 4-8-2s (1949–55), the 556.0 class two-cylinder 2-10-0s (1952–8), and the 477.0 class two-cylinder 4-8-4Ts (1950–5) – a quartet of locomotive types that fused much of the very best of French, German, American, and, of course, Czech and Austrian design practice (Czechoslovakia, founded in 1918 and divided in 1992, had long been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to produce a fleet of eight hundred engines which could stand comparison with any built elsewhere in the world.