BAGDContext CSM

Lovely!

Speed

Classic…Lisa Fonssagrives by Toni Frissell…1951

Nice

Here is a picture of a massive steam loco pulling a freight train in the US during the early 1950s.

In fact, the engine is a so-called, “big-boy,” designed in 1941 for the Unon Pacific Railroad in the US. These were the biggest steam locos ever produced and used.

It’s worth considering how and why things got so big…

A steam loco is an arrangement of parts: fire-box, boiler, and driving wheels. These elements have to be put together to optimise performance within a context defined by the scale of operation (distance), geography (terrain), and all of the existing infrastructure of the railway (loading guage, curves etc). This last is not just about the distance between the rails, it’s also about the size of existing tunnels, and bridges etc.

You can see that, in this context, every engine is a kind of heroic compromise…

In the US context of these enormous engines, the task was to design an engine with the power to pull huge loads up steep gradients, and to keep going across long distances.The engine needed both power and stamina.

By the 1940s, this was the last throw of the dice for steam traction faced with new developments in diesel and electric locos.

A steam loco eats coal and water…so, fitting a bigger tender increases the range of the engine and improves performance. You can reduce the number of stops for taking on water and extra coal. Accordingly, the tender on these engines was massive; it had seven axels and shifted coal to the firebox using an automated conveyor.

The firebox was the size of a room. It measured nearly six by two and a half meters, and heated the boiler to provide steam to two sets of driving wheels.

The arrangement of wheels on a loco is recorded using Whyte notation. In this case, the engine is identified as a 4-8-8-4.

You can probably guess that something this big is great on the straight…but also has to get around the existing curves. To allow these continental scaled engines to take the existing curves of the track in their stride, they are articulated according to the Mallet design of engine.

The Big Boy fleet of twenty five locomotives were used primarily in the Wyoming Division to haul freight over the Wasatch mountains between Green River, Wyoming and Ogden, Utah, in the US. They were the only locomotives to use a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement consisting of a four-wheel leading truck for stability entering curves, two sets of eight driving wheels and a four-wheel trailing truck to support the large firebox.

Led by mechanic Otto Jabelmann, the Union Pacific Railroad’s design team worked with the American Locomotive Company. The team found that Union Pacific’s goals could be achieved by enlarging the firebox, lengthening the boiler, adding four driving wheels and reducing the size of the driving wheels from 69 to 68 in (1,753 to 1,727 mm) on a new engine. That’s how things got to be the size they got.

Here is the cover of Catherine Merridale’s book about Lenin’s famous railway journey from Zurich to St Petersburg-Finlyandski (the Finland station).

It’s a dramatic story…by 1917, the German military leaders could see that fighting on both eastern and western fronts would quickly exhaust the German war-effort. In a desperate effort to capitalise on the abdication of the Russian Tsar and to take advantage of the power-vacuum in Russia, thet hatched a plan to move the revolutionary leader, Lenin, from exile in Switzerland and return him to Russia. The objective of this plan was for Lenin to take power and to remove Russia from the war…

It didn’t play out according to plan…

Lenin was cautious about being moved and understood the dangers beyond Switzerland’s neutrality. Accordingly, he demanded a sealed train. In simple terms this involved the addition of custom seals on the train. However, the addition of the seals added to the intrinsic drama of moving Lenin and effectively mythologised the episode as part of the folklore of 20C history.

Once in Russia, Lenin ruthlessly exploited the historic opportunity given him by Germany.

From our own perspective, it would certainly have been better for Lenin to have stayed in Switzerland.

Lenin died in 1924, an event which created another power-vacuum. This one exploited by the even more ruthless Stalin.

Here’s a picture of the preserved steam loco that moved Lenin’s dead body.

Here is a coloured picture of a US steam loco from the 1930s…it’s a pretty ordinary loco under the streamlined body-work. Actually, the thing I liked was the telegraph post next to the railway track.

The railway was the first information super-highway. The track was lined with telegraph posts…and these gave the train journey a powerful sense of percussive rhythm. This visual trope was augmented by the distinctive sound of the steam loco and by the sound of the train riding over the points, and the joins in the track.

Remember that, before welded track, the railway was made up of short lengths. Just like on a tran set.

This is a photograph by the great US railway photographer, O Winston Link. I’ve posted about him before…I love this photo; you get a sense of the scale of the machines, but also of how dirty and battered these locos were by the 1950s…and why the railways, eveywhere, had to modernise.

The night photography and the machines give Link’s images a powerful sense of 1950s US glamour…

Steam, Steel, and Stars (the night-time railway photographs of O Winston Link)

Here is a postcard of the railway station at Yunnan Fou. And here is an image of the station in 1910, with everyone waiting for the arrival of the first train.

I love the flags and bunting, and the slightly out-of-focus background. It reminds me of the famous Lumiere film…

Quite an unusual arragement of track at this station…health and safety considerations would usually distance the platform and junction. This looks like an accident wating to happen.