Giants of Steam
Page 42
The compelling sight – and sound – of express steam in full flight is captured in this stirring shot of Merchant Navy Pacific, 35018 British India Line racing through Raynes Park on a London Waterloo to Bournemouth train on 16 December 1962.
For a brief spell, the Great Western Railway’s Cheltenham Flyer was the world’s fastest train. Here it is in April 1937, behind one of Charles Collett’s Castle class 4-6-0s, 5004 Llanstephen Castle. Built in 1927, the Cheltenham Flyer remained in front line service until April 1962.
Thermodynamic principles learned from the Great Western’s Castles were embodied in Nigel Gresley’s magnificent streamlined A4 Pacifics for the LNER. Here, brand new 2509 Silver Link roars out of London Kings Cross with the press run of the Silver Jubilee on 7 September 1935.
Co-operation between Nigel Gresley and Andre Chapelon led to the scientific testing of the striking new LNER P2 2-8-2, 2001 Cock o’ the North, at Vitry, near Paris, in 1934.
After the Second World War, extensive tests were made between rival forms of traction. In this British Railways poster of 1949, a brand new Stanier Class 5 4-6-0 competes with a pair of equally new 1,600 hp LMS diesel-electrics, both overtaking a suburban electric multiple unit of 1927 vintage.
Stanier’s experimental LMS Turbomotive at Euston station on 27 June 1935. This was the first turbine locomotive built in Britain. Stanier wanted to build fifty improved Turbomotives, but the financial and operating strictures imposed by the Second World War intervened. The handsome 2,600 hp 6202 was rebuilt as a conventional Pacific in 1952, but destroyed in a horrific crash that year.
The experimental water-tube boilered four-cylinder compound, 10,000, has arrived at Kings Cross, on time, at the head of the non-stop Flying Scotsman. From left to right: Nigel Gresley, the locomotive’s designer-in-chief; drivers J. Gascoigne and R. Eltringham; and firemen H. A. Brayston and J. W. Ritchie; 31 July 1930.
Adolf Wolff’s magnificent Deutsche Reichsbahn 05 001 4-6-4 parades for newsreel cameras at Borsig works, Berlin, 1 March 1935. Sister locomotive, 05 002, reached 200.4 kph [124.5mph] the following year. These supremely fast and reliable red engines lost their streamlined casings in 1944 and were rebuilt in 1951. Sadly, 05 002 was scrapped in 1960; 05 001 has been preserved.
One of 6,719 Class 52 Kriegsloks built across the Nazi Reich from 1942, 52 301 is at the head of a post-war Austrian State Railways freight train. They ran in Austria until 1976, and in East Germany until 1988.
Andre Chapelon (left), has just ridden from Lyon on the footplate of his sensationally efficient 240-705, here on test at Paris Gare du Lyon in 1938. Erwin Mulotte (right), President of the Association Francaise des Amis des Chemins de Fer, looks suitably impressed.
The 240P compound 4-8-0 was a development of the 240-700 series. This is 240P 10 at Laroche in 1947. Built in 1940–1, these twenty-five locomotives were Chapelon’s favourites. They were retired in the early 1950s.
Dressed in Givenchy, Audrey Hepburn poses in front of 232-U1, an equally stylish SNCF de Caso 4-6-4. The scene, at Gare du Nord, is from Funny Face filmed in 1956.
Chapelon’s solitary 242A1, a three-cylinder compound 4-8-4, was a rebuild of an ineffective Etat Railway 4-8-2 and could sustain power outputs unknown outside the USA. Built in 1946, 242A1 was scrapped – scandalously – in 1960.
The Hiawatha departs Chicago Union station in 1935 in the first year of her fast-as-an-arrow flight over the four hundred miles to Minneapolis. The streamlined A-class Atlantics ran smoothly, day-in, day-out at over 100 mph.
Dramatic 1938 publicity shot of one of Paul Kiefer’s beautiful and highly effective new J3-a Hudsons, streamlined by the industrial artist Henry Dreyfuss for service on the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited. Running at a mile-a-minute from New York to Chicago, this was one of the world’s greatest, and certainly its most stylish, trains.
Best known for the legendary Union Pacific Big Boy 4-8-8-4s, Otto Jabelmann (right) pursued maximum horsepower wherever possible. Here he is, in December 1938, inspecting General Electric’s 5,000 hp steam-turbine electric locomotive with UP President, W. M. Jeffers (left), and GE vicepresident H. L. Andrews (centre); Big Boys proved to be more powerful and far more successful than this intriguing machine.
Designed and styled in-house by the Norfolk and Western Railway, the J-class 4-8-4s of 1941 were, indisputably, all-time greats. On loan to the Pennsylvania Railroad, No. 610 spun a 15-car, 1,050-train up to 110 mph.
A Union Pacific Big Boy doing what a Big Boy was designed to do: hauling huge freight trains up and over the formidable Wahsatch Range as the railroad crossed from Utah to Wyoming. Eight of these mobile thunderstorms are preserved, although none has been steamed since the last was struck off service at Green River, Wyoming in 1962.
This is New York Central Niagara class 4-8-4, No. 615 towards the end of its days in the mid-1950s on the railroad’s Indianapolis–Cincinnati section. Designed by Paul Kiefer with Alco, the Niagaras were amongst the finest of all passenger steam locomotives.
A gloriously cinematic shot of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s S-1 6-4-4-6 express passenger locomotive of 1939. The biggest non-articulated passenger locomotive of all, it was certainly fast, although tales of speeds of 140 mph and more remain the stuff of railroad myth.
A Pennsylvania T-1 4-4-4-4, a class of duplex-passenger locomotives that led a notably short life. Two prototypes were built in 1942, the remainder in 1945–6; most were out of service within six years.
The 556.0 class 2-10-0, designed by Vlastimil Mares for the Czech State Railways, was one of the finest European freight locomotives. Built between 1952 and 1958, several are preserved and working today.
One of the remarkable 59-class 4-8-2 + 2-8-4 Garratts of the East African Railways pounding hard up the main line from Nairobi to Mombasa. These handsome British-African engines revolutionised services on the metre-gauge EAR.
The most memorable of all Russian steam locomotives were surely Lev Lebedyansky’s tall and elegant P36 class 4-8-4s. Up to a thousand of these handsome machines were to have been built until, in 1956, the Politburo issued a decree banning steam development.
A pair of QJ 2-10-2s, built in the 1980s, march forward towards the Jinpeng pass. Opened in 1995, the Jitong railway was the world’s last new steam main line. The QJs, a class of 4,714 sturdy mixed-traffic engines, worked the line for the next ten years, waving the flag for mainline steam into the twenty-first century.
Livio Dante Porta, one of the great steam locomotive engineers of recent decades, seen here in 1971 sporting a pair of goggles given to him by Andre Chapelon on the footplate of No 1802, a General Belgrano Railway C-16 4-8-2. Porta modified this metre-gauge Argentinian engine, built by Baldwin in 1948, between 1969 and 1974, making it highly efficient.
‘Better to carry out than to promise’, is the slogan emblazoned along Porta’s streamlined 4-8-0, Argentina. What Porta carried out in 1948 was the transformation of a metre-gauge Cordoba Central Railway Pacific, into a locomotive with a power-to-weight ratio equal to Chapelon’s mighty SNCF 240P.
Outline drawing of the 5AT [Advanced Technology] Project, a high-speed locomotive designed by David Wardale between 1998 and 2012. The aim had been to create a 200 kph locomotive that could run across the British railway network. The project was put on hold due to lack of funding.
Bill Hoole was a celebrated East Coast driver who retired from Kings Cross in 1959. Photographed on the footplate of A4 Pacific 60034 Lord Farringdon, Hoole set a postwar record that year for British steam: 112 mph, with A4 60007 Sir Nigel Gresley.
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