Grassroots Railroad Sports?

Norfolk & Western E-2a Pacific #578 out to Ohio Railway Museum is reportedly getting a cosmetic restoration. That engine has always kind of been an odd duck, an N&W steam engine that's the last of it's class and was an excursion engine that ran until 1978, but is largely forgotten by railfans. 

N&W got rid of a lot of their smaller, older non-articulated engines pretty early, and most of the Pacifics were supplanted by the streamlined K 4-8-2s and J 4-8-4s, but the #578 and a sister, #563, hung around until 1958. Between 1917 and 1944, the #578 was primarily used to pull passenger trains throughout the Scioto Division out of Columbus, Ohio. Late in it's career, the #578 and #563 spent the remainder of their revenue career pulling local passenger trains on the N&W’s Norton Branch between Norton, VA and Bluefield, WV. When N&W retired the last two Pacifics, the Ohio Railfan Association was looking for a steam locomotive to display. The #578 was available and it had operated in Ohio on the Scioto Division, so they accepted its donation.

Upon arrival in Worthington, the #578 was still in operational condition. Beginning on July 10, 1960, No. 578 pulled the association's short-distance trains and the locomotive carried over 3,000 passengers during that year's operating season. In 1966, the #578's flue time expired, and it had to be removed from service. Volunteers subsequently spent the next four years repairing the boiler in order to return the locomotive to service. Restoration work was completed in 1970, and #578 pulled some more tourist trains on the now-slightly extended line for the Association, which changed its name to the Ohio Railway Museum. By the end of the 1970s, it was discovered that the #578 had a broken spring hanger, which was deemed too expensive to repair or replace. The ORyM had also decided to primarily focus on being a trolley museum and the #578 was deemed to be outside the focus. 

It's sat in Worthington, OH on display ever since. It's kind of in a weird spot, because the ORyM is largely a trolley museum, and the #578 is outside of their focus and is not financially feasible for them to run, but the #578 is a big draw for visitors to see on display, so they won't really relinquish ownership of it. I've also heard that there may be some sort of damage to the cylinders, possible freeze-related, due to years of outdoors storage. Jerry Joe Jacobson, who formed Age of Steam Roundhouse, tried to get the #578 back when he owned the Ohio Central Railroad but made the mistake of letting it be known that he really wanted it as trade fodder. Jacobson really wanted NKP #763, on display at the Virginia Museum of Transportation, and figured that the last remaining N&W Pacific would be the carrot to coax the #763 out of Roanoke's hands. Some ORyM members were already not fond of the idea of getting rid of the #578, and then really got mad when they found out that it would be leaving the state of Ohio and refused to sell it to him.

In reply to NickD :

I am looking at this nude photo of Big Boy 4014 without any cladding which shows a bunch of rivets around the fire box and or boiler. I read that Big Boy was built in 1941 which must have been around the same times as the construction of the Liberty freighter ships which used welded butt seam building technology (which we all know had problems with cold water and poor steel metallurgy). Where any steam engines with welded butt joints ever built?

In reply to prowlerjc :

Like this?

Amazon.com: Superpower: The Making of a Steam Locomotive

In reply to VolvoHeretic :

There were some fully-welded butt seam boilers, but not many. The lap seam had fallen out of favor well before WWI, and had been replaced with the butt seam design. Trying to operate anything with a lap seam boiler today is very difficult. The FRA requires annual inspections and some states may require them to be operated at half their rated PSI, while some simply ban them outright. I know that was an issue that Whitewater Valley encountered when they bought East Broad Top standard-gauge 0-6-0 #6: they were planning an operational restoration and learned that because of the lap seam boiler, they were going to have to completely replace the boiler.

Fully-welded boilers first made their appearance in '37. Alco really was pushing the idea, and owned a ton of patents on the design. After about '46, it became clear that the steam locomotive was on it's way out and that diesel was the future, at least at Alco, and they sold all those patents to Lima Locomotive Works. Lima still thought steam engines had life left in them, and was trying to sell concepts like the double-Belpaire firebox 4-8-6, and was interested in them, but they never did anything with it.

The first application of a fully fusion-welded boiler was on Delaware & Hudson 2-8-0 #1219. The engine actually dated back to 1916, but Alco constructed a new boiler for the #1219 and it was installed at Schenectady. There was a ton of testing on it, and Alco put out a bunch of articles touting it's superiority, but as far as I know, D&H never converted any of their other engines, nor did their newly-built non-experimental locomotives constructed afterwards (Alco constructed D&H's 4-8-4s and 4-6-6-4s) feature it. I believe all-welded boilers were used on the trio of experimental high-pressure 2-8-0 and 4-8-0s, but those engines were not really successful and saw limited use.

During WWII, locomotive constructors were not to build experimental locomotives, and a lot of materials were restricted. You see engines like N&W Js built without streamlining and lightweight rods, and after new engines started moving towards nickel-steel boilers pre-war, they went back to carbon-steel during the war. So the fully-welded concept took a back seat to established designs and older construction methods. Post-war, Alco took up the idea of selling retrofit fully-welded boilers to railroads to install on older designs, as well as offering it on new-construction engine. From what people can find, sales were such:

• Chesapeake & Ohio - five new locomotives #2785-#2789, and the #2789 still exists at North Judson, Indiana today.
• Chicago & Northwestern - six boilers for 4-6-4s to replace riveted boilers, also converted to oil
• Milwaukee Road - 10 (I think it may have been for some of their 4-8-4s receiving new boilers)
• New York Central - 1 boiler for an unknown Niagara. There is documentation that "New York Central plans to install welded boiler shells on all of its 27 Niagara 4-8-4's and 40 Hudsons" but based on the date of this entry and on the retirement of CMO Kiefer in March, 1953, there is serious question that few, if any, Niagaras received welded boiler shells.
• Canadian Pacific - 2 boilers for G-5 Pacifics #1216 and #1231. The G-5s had crack-prone nickel-steel boilers, and CPR was apparently considering reboilering them. Oddly the #1293 received a new boiler, but of riveted carbon steel.

It would seem odd that N&W, who pushed steam to it's design limits at the time with the Class J, Class A, and Class Y6b, stuck with riveted boilers on it's late construction engines, since N&W was turning out engines until 1953. The reason is that the ICC required all fully-welded boilers to be annealed after welding and the N&W lacked a furnace large enough to anneal an entire boiler (Alco reportedly built a furnace that could accomodate a boiler for a 4-6-6-4) and, since riveted boilers worked just fine for them, they never made the jump.

C&O #2789 sans boiler jacket at the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum, showing the lack of rivets for the butt seams at the boiler courses.

Now, several new locomotives are being built, or have been built, with fully-welded boilers, and at least one other older locomotive has received a new welded boiler. The British Tornado new construction engine has a fully-welded boiler, and PRR T1 #5550 will have one once it's complete, and I'm pretty sure C&NW #1385 received a fully-welded boiler when the new boiler was built for it during it's ongoing restoration. 

The whole nickel-steel boiler situation ended up being a bit of a debacle. Around the early '30s, they began building boilers using nickel-steel, citing it's higher tensile strength (70,000psi vs 50,000psi) as being capable of handling higher pressures, as well as being lighter in weight. Not a bad theory but then you get into the mid-'40s and all of a sudden there are all sorts of modern locomotives laid up with cracks in the boiler, while lots of older stuff was still rattling around with conventional carbon-steel boiler. Don Ball Jr.'s book on the PRR in the '40s and '50s mentioned that literally overnight, all 26 of the PRR's Q2 4-4-6-4 were laid up with boiler cracks and the PRR had to scramble to shuffle around J1 2-10-4s and lease ATSF 5011-class 2-10-4s to take up the slack. Similarly, ATSF's eleven 3765-series and ten 3776-series 4-8-4s all developed boiler cracks (the later 2900-series engines were built during WWII and used carbon-steel boiler and never had those issues) and the ATSF had to replace them all with carbon steel boilers between 1949 and 1952. CPR's G-5 Pacifics were noted to have boiler issues as well, with CPR experimenting with fully-welded carbon steel boilers (a fully-welded carbon steel boiler was comparable to a riveted butt-seam nickel-steel boiler) on two G-5s, installing a new carbon steel boiler on at least one, and those who worked on Jack Showalter's pair of G-5s noting that the boilers looked like a patchwork quilt under the jacketing from segments replaced.

What went wrong with nickel-steel boilers? I've heard three theories and it could be any or all of them in combination:

• Nickel-steel tends to work-harden from vibrations, and so the high amount of flexing from both firing and bouncing down a railroad track, caused the more rigid nickel-steel to begin to crack more than the old softer carbon steel boilers
• The nickel-steel boilers were more prone to caustic embrittlement.
• When manufacturers (particularly Baldwin) were putting in the holes for rivets in the boiler, they weren't drilled or flame-cut, they were made with a hydraulic punch. That caused stress risers in the more brittle nickel-steel boilers, which then spread into cracks.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffacebook%2Fvideos%2F1533871293923735%2F&width=500&show_text=false&height=281

Hopefully this embed works, the Facebook video stuff is always so iffy. But someone got footage of UP #4014 annihilating a drone on it's way out of Nokomis, Illinois.

I will say that I'm amazed at the amount of railfans online still complaining about the #4014 being converted to oil firing. Per one comment I saw online "I’m not amazed [by it] because it’s not coal powered, they converted everything from coal to fuel, so now It’s nothing different than their other locomotives." Yep, you heard it, apparently converting the largest operating steam locomotive in the world to oil-fired makes it no more interesting than a regular EMD SD40-2 or a GE ET44AC. And I've seen that from other people too. And yet no one complained that the #844 has been converted to oil, or that the #3985 was converted to oil-fired back when she was still running. But, run a Big Boy on oil and, apparently, it's not worth some people's time or interest.

Also seeing people complain about having a diesel in tow, and some still spouting the conspiracy that #4014 isn't really operational and they just shove it around with a diesel. Yes, UP did get the #4014 set up so that it has fully independent Positive Train Control on board, but they like having the diesel for dynamic braking and to use as protection power in the event that #4014 suffers a mechanical failure. The main reason for installing independent PTC is that, before it had to be paired with a very specific diesel that had the connectors for the LeaPTC system, which basically piggybacked off the trailing diesel. That meant that if that diesel wasn't free, either due to mechanical issues or it being off on freight service, the #4014 couldn't run. Now, they can just hook up any old diesel behind it, because everything that the #4014 needs is onboard the steam locomotive.

 Railfans in general seem to be a pretty ungrateful bunch, and it seems like that is no more evident with the UP steam program. Along with the complaints about oil firing and a diesel helper at all time, I can't count how many people I see complaining that UP gave away the #3985, instead of having the #844, #3985, and #4014 all operational at once. And even further, there are those who also expect, or demand, UP to also restore parts donor FEF-3 #838 and doublehead that with the #844. And then railfans wonder why railroads want nothing to do with them.

There actually is a historical precedent of oil-fired UP 4000s. UP had steam locomotives burning coal and oil, and it was dependent on where they were assigned. The LA&SL, for example, was all oil-fired territory, whereas there was a mix of oil and coal out of Cheyenne. The big 4-12-2s were all coal-fired, while the Challengers ran as a mix of oil and coal-fired, and the FEF-3 4-8-4s were swapped from coal-burning to oil-fired in 1946, at just two years old. 

The 4-8-8-4s were all delivered as coal-burning, and all would be retired as coal-burning. But in 1946, there was threat of a coal miner strike, and UP was worried about their biggest and newest freight power being parked for lack of fuel, and decided to increase their pool of oil-burning locomotives. So they took the #4005, which was due for shopping at the time anyways, and a standard Thomas oil burner was installed .A single burner was used and the only modification was the increasing of primary air around the burner. A special fuel tank was designed at Omaha and built at Cheyenne to replace the coal compartment. The burner was specially ordered and the largest available. From a steaming standpoint, the #4005 steamed better than any oil burning power UP men had seen on any road, and without a loss in power. However, the single burner caused hot-spotting on the huge crown sheet which in turn, caused it to leak. According to UP veterans, every trip was the same: when you looked in the firebox it was just like a rainstorm, with water pouring down so fast that it almost extinguished the fire. That could have been solved with more time, and by adding a second burner, but there was another issue, and that was oil consumption. The #4005 when worked hard, and every steam engine was being worked hard in this era, just could not make it from oil tank to oil tank. According to Bob Krieger, who was a UP Steam Team engineer and fireman with the #844 and #3985 excursions, oil usage was 5-17 gallons per minute on the #844 and around 20gpm on the #3985, so a 4-8-8-4 would have used even more than that.

The coal mine strike never materialized, and UP saw the logistic issues of converting all the Big Boys to oil-fired (designing a new burner system to prevent hot-spotting and adding more oil tanks along the line) and converted the #4005 back to coal-fired shortly afterwards. I have heard that shortly after WWII, UP had also been considering additional 4-8-8-4s that were too be assigned to the Los Angeles & Salt Lake and would have been built as oil-fired engines, since that was an oil-burning district, but that UP bailed on the order. The only real difference would have been a 4-10-2 centipede tender instead of the 4-10-0 centipede tender used on the regular Big Boys. The added rear axle would have been both to support the larger size of the tender and to help negotiatee wyes while reversing, since the engine wouldn't have fit the turntables on the LA&SL.

On Saturday, the weather was supposed to be nice and sunny, and I decided to try and get some photos of the Adirondack Railroad, since it seems like any time I try to chase them north of Remsen, it's typically cloudy and rainy. I didn't want to spend the whole day chasing though, so I figured I'd just chase the Gateway (Utica-Thendara, with layover at Thendara) northbound and then leave. Well, I got up early and drove to Utica and when I got there, the #2400 was on the head end of the train, but the #2400 faces south, so it would be running long hood forward, and I really didn't feel like getting photos of that. I almost just called it a day, but then I figured, "Well, it'll be running the right way with the southbound trip, and I know that leaves Thendara at 4:30." That meant I could have all day free, and then just head up to Thendara in the late afternoon and catch the #2400, which I rarely get to see running, heading south.

So, at 3:00, I hopped in my MR2 Spyder and went tearing north to Thendara, getting there around 4:10ish. The #2400 was sitting there at the station, ready to head south with the Gateway, while next to it was the Explorer but with a really bizarre lashup. They had the south-facing RS-18u #1835 on the north end of that train, with the north-facing Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern C425 #2453 sitting on the south end of the train. So, they were running push-pull, but with the locomotives running long hood forward on either end of the train, a really strange decision. Swapping the locomotives to each other end would have allowed them to run the right way in either direction.

After the Explorer unloaded, they ran it south past the engine house. While they were down there, they did decide to swap motive power around to the opposite ends of the train for the runs the next day. It was kind of odd that they were running two locomotives on the Explorer, since that's usually a pretty short train that a single locomotive handles, but maybe there were concerns about the 1800hp RS-18u behind able to handle the climb to Big Moose by itself.

The #2453 is looking no worse for the wear after her little derailment a month or so ago up to Griffiss. While I was waiting for the #2400 to leave, I got talking to Adirondack engineer and conductor Bill Moll, also a Conrail veteran and a generally great guy, about the power situation. I mentioned them borrowing the MA&N C425 and he said "Story of this season, apparently. We had a bunch of MA&N power up here last weekend." He said the #1845 has been out of service since last year, needed some engine work, and they got that done and brought it up to Thendara and other issues cropped up. And the M420W, #3573, is apparently laid up with a laundry list of issues currently. When I'd chased the High Peaks Limited, it was up at Thendara and Adirondack engineer Deandre Walters said it had acted up the day before, had been left at Thendara, and then had been running the Explorers that day, seemingly fixed. Guess that was a band-aid. So, currently, it seems as though Adirondack has two operational engines, with the #2400 and #1835. The #1845 and #3573 are down, and RS-3 #8255 and S-1 #9411 have never really run for the Adirondack and need work to be used.

The #2400, in front of the Thendara depot. She's a great-looking machine in that almost D&H-inspired livery, which is supposed to be the new look of the Adirondack. They have a few cars painted like it, and they teased a rendering of the M420W #3573 in this paint scheme a few years back, but I'm guessing paint is a pretty low priority for stuff currently. I don't know why the added those orange barrels there, but they weren't there when I was up this way last month, and they were kind of in the way for photos.

I did get this shot by asking someone if I could temporarily move the barrel on the left just to get a quick photo. I didn't want to be a nuisance and move them both though, so I settled for just this shot.

A neat spotting feature of the #2400 is this flared radiator section, which identifies it as a Phase I C424. Only relatively early C424s had these boxy radiator enclosures, while the later C424s and all the C425s had flush-mounted radiators. Those oblong openings in the sides of the running boards are also a Phase I feature, with the Phase IIs having no openings, and the Phase I handrails are attached to top of walkway while they are attached to the side sills on the Phase IIs. Some other spotting features include one air reservoir on each side (both on the right side on Phase II) and battery boxes fore and aft of the cab (under left rear walkway on Phase II). I also like how the stripe has the neat little mountain outline at the rear of the locomotive.

This profile view of the nose shows the signature V-shaped cab nose and class lights, as well as the Phase I battery boxes ahead of and behind the cab. Also, you may notice that the visors are under the headlights and be wondering what that's about. Really, you don't need to keep rain and snow off the headlight, because they generate enough heat to melt off ice and snow. The visors are actually there to keep the light from reflecting off the top of the short hood and blinding the engineer.

Behind the #2400 you've got their ex-UP City Of Portland dome car and their ex-NYC diner car, both in the new Adirondack appearance. 

A bit father back, and this would have been a great shot if it weren't for those stupid orange barrels.

4:30pm arrives and the #2400 gets out of town, passing by the #2453, which was shut down for the night.

Passing through Forestport. To the far left you can see the Great Stationhouse, now a private residence, and in the first photo to the right of the locomotive is one of those weird metal chevron signs that the NYC installed. I'm not sure what a single wing off to one side means, but I've seen ones with two wings that designated a cut, or close clearance area.

Passing by Remsen depot at a good clip. You can see that the leaves have already started to change colors in areas.

Passing over Route 12 and by the U16 milepost in Barneveld. We're back on the old Utica & Black River, so all the mileposts here reference Utica. You can see the change in grade in the background, at the start of Remsen Hill. On the Adirondack Division, Remsen Hill is shorter than Big Moose Hill, but it does have a steeper gradient. The general consensus with NYC engineers back in the day was that if your train strugged at Remsen Hill, you were going to be in trouble at Big Moose.

And arriving back at Utica, as the sun creeps below the horizon.

I also managed to get this shot from the north side of Utica Yard, with the apparently out of service M420W #3573 at left and the old "NYC" (really ex-L&N/Hercules Powder) SW1 #705 at right. The #705 was the first locomotive purchased for use when the Adirondack Railroad was formed back in 1992, and it's been around for 32 years, but apparently they sold it roughly 10 years back to a new owner. That owner wanted to move it off the property then, but the friction bearing trucks and lack of alignment control couplers was going to make it too difficult to move, so it was leased back to the Adirondack. It fell out of service back in 2020, and when the lease came due, the new owner announced that he was finally going to move it to one of his properties. It's had it's truck swapped for roller bearing-equipped trucks, and I'm guessing it had blocks welded in the coupler pocket to give it a poor man's alignment control coupler, and that track is where stuff is parked before it leaves the property. Sad to see this one leave, considering the history, but it also wasn't really useful to them anymore. Too low of horsepower, no dynamic brakes, weird old-school air brake schedule.

Local news station had a story on the North Creek Depot Museum.  It has a pretty nice model train set up inside too.  Could be a nice day trip.