American Steam Locomotives - 2019

2019·121.8 MB·English

AMERICAN

STEAM LOCOMOTIVES
Design and Development, 1880–1960
WILLIAM L. WITHUHN
indiana university press and the railway & locomotive historical society, inc.
This book is a joint publication of Printed in the
United States of America
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing Cataloging information is available
Herman B Wells Library 350 from the Library of Congress.
1320 E. 10th St.
Bloomington, IN 47405-3707 ISBN 978-0-253-03933-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03934-7 (ebook)
iupress.indiana.edu
The Railway & Locomotive
Historical Society, Inc.
PO Box 2913
Pflugerville, TX 78691-2913
rlhs.org
© 2019 by Gail J. Withuhn
All rights reserved
IUP Acquisitions Editor
Ashley Runyon
R&LHS Editor
Peter A. Hansen
Design, typesetting, and layout
Kevin J. Holland
No part of this book may be reproduced
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The paper used in this book meets the
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– Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ansi z39.48–1992.
to John H. White, jr.

Contents
Foreword by Kevin P. Keefe vi
Acknowledgements xii
Section I 2
1 High-Wheeled Racers 4
2 More Wheels and Bigger Fireboxes 36
3 Vehicular Design for Horsepower 56
4 Big Wheels Turning 78
Section II 96
5 Compounding 98
6 Superheating 118
7 Francis Cole 132
8 Locomotive Safety Regulation 152
9 Leadership in Industrial Research 174
10 Federal Takeover 188
Section III 206
11 The Formative Contest 208
12 The Steam Locomotive’s Final Form: The Texas Type 224
13 The Steam Locomotive’s Final Form: The Hudson 240
14 Streamlining 258
15 The Northern 268
16 Giants Upon the Earth 286
17 Counterpoint: Why the Diesel? 308
18 Big Boy and Allegheny 334
19 The T1 and Poppet Valves 360
20 Norfolk & Western’s Big Three 386
21 Resisting the Revolution 402 Central Vermont Railway
No. 454, a 2-8-0 Consolidation-
22 Industrial Beauty and the Beholder 422 type engine, takes on water at
Amherst, Mass.
Index 444
Courtesy Kalmbach Media
vi American Steam Locomotives: Design and Development, 1880–1960
Foreword
by Kevin P. Keefe
T he transportation scholar was having a hard time with his
154-ton beast. It was a hot, humid Sunday afternoon in July 1987, all
the more miserable if you were inside the cab of Pennsylvania Railroad
K4s steam locomotive No. 1361, where close confines and a boiler full of
steam at 205 psi had caused the temperature to soar well past 100 degrees.
William L. Withuhn, on Monday through Friday the curator of transportation
at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, was
moonlighting this particular weekend, sweating it out in heavy denim overalls,
gauntlet gloves, and a Kromer engineer’s cap.
The normally gregarious Withuhn was all business, especially now that his
immense charge appeared to be stuck on the tracks of the Nittany & Bald Eagle,
a central Pennsylvania short line. Only an occasional one-word instruction
or epithet emerged from his mouth as he went about his business. He was
the classic grumpy hogger. And for good reason: a torrential rain had struck
moments after the train stopped for a photo opportunity. Now, with the rails
covered in slick-as-grease dead leaves, the big 4-6-2’s 80-inch driving wheels
were having difficulty getting traction, even with a short passenger train. With
a schedule to keep, and a short window ahead on Conrail’s always-busy main
line, Withuhn and his fireman were under the gun.
Bill Withuhn eventually got his burly Pacific rolling, of course, thanks to
his skill at the throttle and his patience with everyone else in the cab. Later,
in the yard at Altoona, he could allow himself a moment to relax. His visitor
relaxed, too, having witnessed a rare moment in which the grimy engineer,
the credentialed museum executive, the restless journalist, and the unabashed
steam fan somehow synthesized all his passions into one successful moment
– just as he has with the monumental book you now hold in your hands.
A master of the art
Restored Pennsylvania Railroad
A central fact of Bill’s career is that he was a licensed locomotive engineer, Class K4s 4-6-2 Pacific No.
something that brought him not only a singular sense of pride but also informed 1361 on one of its early fantrips,
taken on Conrail in April 1987,
his work as a historian and curator, probably in ways even he could not fully
near Altoona, Pa.
understand. Bill knew what it meant to take on the responsibility of a trainload Ken Murry, Courtesy Kalmbach Media
vii
of passengers as he used the throttle and reverse lever and brake handle to coax
the most out of a recalcitrant machine. In those experiences, he internalized
both the ethos and the techniques of generations of steam engineers.
Bill’s career as an engineer began in 1966, when he first volunteered to
work at New Jersey’s Black River & Western tourist line. His duties included
running the BR&W’s diesels, but he also mastered the railroad’s two steam
locomotives, 2-8-0 No. 60 and 4-6-2 No. 148. The apprentice performed well.
That same year, he was certified as an engineer by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s
New York Division examiner, who handed him a qualification card he kept
for the rest of his life. A few years later, Bill timed his resignation from the Air
Force so he could work on the tourist trains until attending Cornell University’s
graduate business school. Years later, he would put in much more time on the
right-hand side of the cabs of other mainline engines, notably PRR 1361, the
entire stable of locomotives at the Steamtown National Historic Site, and in
what became his favorite charge, Milwaukee Road 4-8-4 No. 261.
The man who oversees the 261, Steve Sandberg, spent long hours in the
cab with Bill and appreciated his skills at handling the engine. “Bill always
approached the locomotive as a very simple machine with a very complex
historical significance,” says Sandberg. “When he ran the engine, he was pretty
gentle with it. He knew these machines are treasures and should be treated
properly. He also saw the 261 as a product of World War II, and he was a
military man himself. He almost saw the engine as an extension of himself.”
An essential book on steam
That notion – the locomotive as an extension of the man – is a familiar
theme running through steam locomotive culture, and it’s apt in the case of
this, Bill’s highest achievement as an author. This book fills a significant gap.
Not that steam hasn’t gotten its due in some form – the shelves of railroad
libraries groan under the weight of hundreds of books covering the subject.
Alas, so many of them are narrow in scope. Some simply are picture books,
depicting the visual drama of steam, but in the end, not telling the reader
very much. Others are in the tradition of the single-railroad “power” book,
typically an exhaustive review of every single locomotive on a given railroad,
loaded with pictures and roster data but lacking in larger context, as if no
other railroad but the XY&Z ever fielded a decent 4-8-4.
Bill’s comprehensive approach to the subject has precedents, but even those
serve to underscore the depth of his achievement. The standard reference on
steam, Alfred W. Bruce’s exhaustive but dry The Steam Locomotive in America:
Its Development in the Twentieth Century, first published in 1952, was impressive
in its analysis of technology but necessarily missed all the perspective developed
in the decades since. Bill’s predecessor and mentor at the Smithsonian, John H.
“Jack” White, authored a landmark book, American Locomotives: An Engineering
History, 1830-1880, first published in 1968 and updated with a second edition
in 1997, but the book ends when, for many readers, steam was just beginning
to get exciting – a bit like reading a book on military aviation that ends with
the Sopwith Camel. This book of Bill’s is explicitly intended as a complement
to Jack White’s monumental work, picking up where the earlier book left off.
The legendary editor of Trains magazine, David P. Morgan, took a stab at the
entirety of modern steam with his Steam’s Finest Hour of 1961, an oversize coffee-
viii American Steam Locomotives: Design and Development, 1880–1960
table book distinguished by Morgan’s pithy insights but otherwise a showcase
of black-and-white action photography. More informative is Kalmbach Books’
Guide to North American Steam Locomotives, a useful compendium of individual
railroad rosters fleshed out with a concise narrative by George H. Drury, first
published in 1993 and released in revised form in 2015. But the book is very
much a digest. Other notable titles are Albert J. Churella’s From Steam to Diesel:
Managerial Customs and Organizational Capabilities in the Twentieth-Century
American Locomotive Industry, and J. Parker Lamb’s Perfecting the American
Steam Locomotive, both fine works that explore essential aspects of steam.
The mystique of technology
Which brings us to this wonderful volume. There are so many reasons to
recommend it. One is Bill’s peerless ability to explain the machine in clear
language, always exhibiting technical credibility balanced with accessibility.
Somehow, he manages to connect with the roundhouse master mechanic as
easily as he does the casual fan. Yet the book is solid in its scholarship: Just
read Bill’s exhaustive and often quite entertaining chapter notes, nearly as
enlightening as the narrative itself.
The book is certain to become a standard in the field for its treatment
of engineering development alone. Bill was around technology his entire
life – as a young man obsessed with cars in 1960s California, as an Air Force
major, and, of course, as a railroader – and here he shows an innate sense of
the importance of problems and breakthroughs both obvious and obscure.
He eloquently unravels the central problem locomotive designers faced, the
everlasting challenge of getting the most out of a boiler and its attendant
components. Bill follows the quest for thermal efficiency, a tale filled with
twists and turns, including the wide adoption of superheaters just before
World War I; the big firebox made possible by Lima’s four-wheel trailing
truck of 1925; the move away from the compound Mallet to the simple
articulated; breakthroughs in metallurgy, interrupted by War Production
Board restrictions of the early 1940s.
But with steam, there’s so much more than the boiler. Thus we get Bill’s
fascinating excursions into such arcana as the debate over the best engine
hinge for an articulated, Baldwin’s solution versus Norfolk & Western’s; or the
on-again, off-again fascination some railroads had with three-cylinder power
delivery, culminating with Union Pacific’s 4-12-2 of 1926; or the astonishingly
fast impact of roller bearings after the success of Timken’s “Four Aces” 4-8-4.
Alone worth the price of the book, at least for some, will be Bill’s brilliant
take on the tricky business of driving-wheel counterbalancing, a field he aptly
describes as “science, pseudoscience, and black art.”
For all his enthusiasm for technology, Bill thinks carefully about the various
audiences that will be drawn to this book and their relative ability to grasp, or care
about, some of the details. Thus, in Chapter 7, his analysis of Alco’s pioneering
designer Francis Cole, we get a surprising bit of advice from an author: If what
follows is heavy going, “skip ahead,” he says, to the next chapter. Cole’s quest was
to find a locomotive’s top sustainable output, and his model for determining it
was a mixture of theories and practices involving such minutiae as evaporation
rates, cylinder horsepower, and combustion losses. Actually, Bill’s explanation
should satisfy most readers, but I still found his advice thoughtful and generous.
Foreword ix