A PRR-owned Fairbanks-Morse H-10-44 rattles the frogs at Eads Tower in East St. Louis in September of 1955. The Pennsy never met a locomotive salesman that they didn't like, and they must have got along great with the F-M rep, because they not only bought the most H10-44s of any railroad (55 out of 195 total), they bought the most Fairbanks-Morse locomotives, period.
Three of the Kentucky & Indiana Terminal's H-10-44s congregate under the Southern Railway coal dock at Louisville, KY on July 14th, 1961. The Fairbanks-Morse hired Raymond Loewy to design a lot of their early products, and he came up with the rounded nose, the swoopy running board skirts, and the big awning over the rear. These design cues carried over to the early H-12-44s, but were later dropped as cost-saving measures.
Frisco wasn't the most adventurous railroad when it came to diesel purchases, largely sticking to EMDs, but they did buy a dozen H-10-44s and four H-12-44s. This one of the H10s at Oklahoma City in February of '68.
One of the CNW H-10-44s idles at Fon du Lac, Wisconsin in August of 1975. C&NW, like Milwaukee Road, was an on-line customer of the Fairbanks-Morse plant at Beloit, WI and so the two of them owned a fair amount of the opposed-piston wonders. Both of them also kept their Fairbanks-Morses congregated on their lines up in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula and they lived well into the '70s.
A mix of Milwaukee Road power at in the deadlines at Milwaukee, WI. The #761, an H-10-44, is front and center, but the #701 on the track behind it is one of the late-production H-12-44s. You can see how the H-12-44 lacks the big rear awning.
Illinois Railway Museum actually has Milwaukee Road #760, which was the H-10-44 demonstrator unit, and the first cataloged diesel locomotive produced by Fairbanks-Morse. It's also operational, and runs fairly frequently.
Southern Pacific H-12-44s, both later production models without the Raymond Loewy styling flourishes, meet at College Park in San Jose, CA. Southern Pacific has added weird angled numberboards off the front of the cabs, while the closer unit, #1531, also has the big trashcan-sized Gyralites that SP was fond of.
SP H-12-44 has come down to grab GP9 #3002 off of Train #126 at San Jose, leaving just #3004 to take three lightweight cars to Monterey as the Del Monte, running long hood forward. It is the last week of April 1971 and on Friday, the oldest named train on the SP will fade into history.
The H-10-44 was offered from '44 until '50, and then it was replaced in '50 with the 1200hp H-12-44, which was offered up until near the end of F-M locomotive production. F-M left the American market in '58 but soldiered on in the Mexican market until 1963, with the H-12-44 available until '61.
One of the SP H-12-44s, equipped with both the big Gyralites and a "wagon wheel" radio antenna is blue-flagged (see the blue metal "Men at Work" sign) with a cut of commuter cars
An H-12-44 out with an SDP45 that was just coming off of overhaul. The SP SDP45s, equipped with steam generators, high-speed gearing and dual control stands, replaced the big Fairbanks-Morse H-24-66 "Train Masters" on the Peninsula Commute, but the H-12-44 switchers hung around for a while longer.
Surprisingly, despite the dismal performance of the Erie-Built passenger locomotives, ATSF went on to be the largest buyer of H-12-44 switchers, with a fleet of 59 of them. The #527 is an early model, with the awning and running board skirts.
ATSF was also the sole buyer of the H-12-44TS, owning a fleet of two. The H-12-44TS was an H-15-44 road switcher carbody with an H-12-44 running gear and a steam generator mounted in the short hood. The H-12-44TS was intended for switching passenger cars at terminals and keeping the cars preheated with steam while they were being moved around. The pair of them were permanently assigned to Chicago, and one of them is preserved at IRM. Also note the boxcars that were converted to mail express cars, with different trucks and steam heat pass-through lines.
A Milwaukee Road H-12-44 idles away at the depot in Menasha, Wisconsin.
The Milwaukee & Northern constructed the 4.7-mile Appleton Branch, running from Menasha, Wis., down into ‘The Flats’ at Appleton, Wis., in 1880. By the mid-1880s, the Menasha, Appleton and Neenah Branches were collectively referred to as the Appleton Branch on timetables. It was also the Appleton Branch of the Superior Division of the Milwaukee Road, after they took over the M&N in 1893. Two years after this photo was taken the Wisconsin State Railroad Plan, 1978 made this comment: “The track on this line is 75 lb. rail laid in the late 1920’s and 60 lb. rail laid in 1902 which has deteriorated to the point that the Milwaukee Road can no longer operate on the line without extensive repairs. Effective April 4, 1978, the C&NW has been granted trackage rights, at least on a temporary basis, to serve these shippers. Thus, the Milwaukee Road has, in effect given its shippers to the C&NW and has indicated that it will seek to abandon this line within the next three years.” The lack of maintenance really shows in this photo. Today, the The branch is still active to Midway Rd. in Menasha, operated by the Canadian Nationa while the 1.7-mile portion of the line from South Appleton to Appleton was abandoned by the MILW in 1981.
A spotless Fairbanks-Morse H-12-44 assigned to Fort Carson works the D&RGW interchange in Colorado Springs. The US military was a fairly reliable purchaser of F-M switchers and I have to wonder if it was due to the fact that the Navy owned large numbers of vessels with Fairbanks-Morse opposed-piston engines.
Norfolk & Western wasn't an original purchaser of any Fairbanks-Morse locomotives, but ironically ended up with quite a few on the roster through mergers. The Virginian Railroad, which N&W bought out in 1959, had dieselized entirely with Fairbanks-Morse power, and then when the Pittsburgh & West Virginia, the Akron, Canton & Youngstown, the Wabash and Nickel Plate were brought into the fold in 1964, all four also owned quite a few F-Ms of their own. Despite the faded blue paint, H-12-44 #2137 is not of Wabash heritage, but NKP. Herman Pevler had been president over at the Wabash before the merger and had simplified the livery with blue with yellow lettering. When he was brought over as president of N&W in '63, so that Stuart Saunders could head to the PRR and lead the charge on the Penn Central merger (in retrospect, Saunders should have stayed at N&W and Pevler should have gone to PC), he changed N&W's corporate look to the same blue with yellow.
The local-ish Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum has an ex-USATC H-12-44 that came from the Seneca Army Depot (which is one of my regular autocross venues) and is the only operational F-M in the northeast region of the US. I really need to get out to that museum this year, but their operating schedule is a little strange.
I read an account of a USATC soldier who talked about how the Fairbanks-Morse engine design was prone to leaking oil from the upper crankcase down into the combustion chamber, and then they would carbon up the exhaust. They also were prone to, when idled for a long time and when they had significant run time on the engine, the engine wouldn't get full ignition and would leak fuel into the exhaust manifold. Then, when you throttled them up, they would ignite the unburnt fuel in the exhaust and ran golfball-sized chunks of burning carbon everywhere. He said one time they were moving a cut of cars full of ammunition and were going up a slight grade on the base's tracks, and it got throwing chunks of carbon on top of boxcar loads of ammunition. They quickly unhooked the cars, tied down the brakes and then got the locomotive the hell away from the cars before it set them on fire.
In 1947, Fairbanks-Morse introduced the H-20-44, which is the most perplexing model that the manufacturer offered. Powered by a 10-cylinder, 20-piston, 2000hp engine and packed in what looked like an oversized end-cab switcher body, F-M muddied the waters by equipping it with road trucks, offering dynamic brakes and M.U capability, and saying it was a road switcher. Railroads were apparently so puzzled by the things that most just gave it a wide birth and preferred the H-15-44/H-16-44, which utilized the same frame as the H-20-44 but less horsepower and with a conventional long hood/short hood configuration. Two of the former Akron, Canton & Youngstown's six are switching at Canton Yard, after the 1964 merger that incorporated the AC&Y. Another 22 H-20-44s were added to the N&W roster the same year through the merger of the Pittsburgh & West Virginia.
Two PRR H-20-44s, equipped with "Train phone" antennas, lead a coal drag at Cassandra, PA. Some railroads preferred to use the H-20-44 as a heavy hump yard switcher, some (Union Pacific and PRR) put them in helper service, and others paired two of them up back to back to make a single 4000hp center-cab locomotive. Fairbanks-Morse actually cataloged a 6-axle version, the H-20-66, but orders never materialized (the H-20-44 itself only sold 96 units, not a resounding success) and so F-M never even bothered to build a demonstrator.
PRR H-20-44 #8927 shifting cars at Hollidaysburg, PA. You can see the interesting semi-circular windows, which were another Raymond Loewy touch that was abandoned later on.
A number of the Union Pacific and AC&Y H-20-44s found their way down to Southwest Portland Cement in Victorville, California, where they toiled in relative obscurity until into the 1980s, almost two decades after they vanished everywhere else. The #409 is ex-Union Pacific, the flared dynamic braking grids being the giveaway identifier.
An AC&Y H-20-44 shoves a Soo Line boxcar at Magadore Yard. The #505 would go on to a second life at Southwest Portland Cement, then was preserved at the Center for Transportation in Galveston, Texas in an inaccurate Union Pacific livery. When Hurricane Ike struck Galveston Island on September 13, 2008, the F-M and much of the museum's collection would be inundated with several feet of salt water.
In '47, Fairbanks-Morse also introduced the H-15-44, which was a more conventional road switcher and used the smaller 8-cylinder, 16-piston engine rated at 1500hp and generated 42,125lbs of tractive effort, continuous. A neat machine that was on par with it's competition (the EMD GP7, the Baldwin DRS-4-4-1500, and the Alco RS-2) the H-15-66 was a pretty weak seller, moving only 35 units total in 3 years before being replaced with the H-16-44. Despite their small numbers, they showed up in some pretty weird places, like the D&RGW, Kansas City Southern, and the Monon. The entirety of Monon's fleet is shown with a Rider Car at Mitchell, Indiana in October of 1956. Being oddballs on the Monon, they were later repowered with EMD prime moves to make them fit in.
CNJ was the biggest buyer of the H-15-44, buying 13 of them brand-new, and then also returning to grab up one of the two demonstrator pairs (the other was bought by Long Island Rail Road, who had it uprated to an H-16-44). Just a year old, the #1502 is in commuter service and awaiting for departure at Communipaw. The CNJ would also return to F-M for a couple of H-16-44s, and then again for H-24-66 "Train Masters". You can see the half-moon cab windows, running board skirts, and the stepped headlight casing, more Loewy styling touches that were dumped on the H-16-44s partway through their production run.
Fairbanks-Morse H-15-44 demonstrator #1502 hauling passengers on the Erie at Waldwick, NJ. Clearly the Erie wasn't impressed with whatever the #1502 did on their rails, because the Erie never purchased any Fairbanks-Morse power.
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