| Posted by Dana M. on August 14, 2016 | |
Beautiful photo Ken - love this one! Thank-you to Steve Crise and everyone at the Rail Giants Museum at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds for holding this night photo shoot. I think that Ed Dickens and the Union Pacific should have gotten this beast out with the 4014 as well and put this locomotive back on the rails again. It would have been easier to convert this beast to burn oil over the 4014 - as it was proven in 1944-1945 (an entire year of testing) with 4005 by a whole team of Alco designers / builders and UP shop workers that trying to convert a Big Boy to burn oil just CAN'T be done. This baby would be easier to restore than the 4014 - just my opinion though - as well as the proven results from the 4005 project to support this opinion.
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The ultimate expression of three-cylinder steam any where. Three-cylinder steam had long been common in Europe, where distances were short, loading gauges limited, and the skill pool available to provide watch maker maintenance.
Us roads had their flirtation with the three-cylinder system in the 1920s, which pretty much played out as new 4-6-4, 2-8-4, 4-8-4 and 2-10 4 types came along. There were, however, a few classes of US engines, sufficiently ambitious in performance and in exploiting the "advantages" of the three-cylinder system, that replacing them, was not cost effective until dieselization.
Lackawanna had coal hauling 4-8-2s. New Haven and Rio Grande had fast freight 4-8-2s. Southern Pacific and UP had faster 2-10-2s, using the 4-10-2 format.
Then there were UP's 4-12-2s, high performance freight haulers simply in a class by them selves. When it came time for a next step, performance wise, what was essentially a 4-12-2 steam plant was applied to four-cylinder articulated running gear to create the line's first Challengers.
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