Symphony for twelve wheels and a coal scoop
Yes, son of Bristol, you can go home again
I became acquainted with Norfolk & Western's class M 4-8-0s at an early age. I was boosted into the cab of No. 467 at Bristol Shop before I was old enough for grammar school. I didn't know what I was looking at, except that there was a lot of heat from that open firedoor. But I was hooked.
Witnessing these rare (though I didn't realize how rare at the time) little creatures going about their business in the yard in my home town of Bristol, Va., and coming and going on the Abingdon Branch mixed train (often called the "V-C" after the Virginia-Carolina Railway that built the Branch, and sometimes called "The Carolina Queen") was as educational as it was fascinating.
Bristol Yard was not the only place I got to watch these engines. My grandfather spent the last 14 years of his career as express messenger on the "V-C", and I made many trips with him on his run. Over the years, I rode behind Ms 382, 429, 495, and several doubleheaders: 382 and 429; 382 and 396 (a non-superheated Bristol yard engine that branch crews hated because it worked the fireman harder -he had to shovel more coal to produce the power of the superheated engines); 429 and 495; and 382 and 429 with the 433 (another Bristol yard engine) pushing. The N&W used the three-engine train to haul rock to a highway project in North Carolina. The 433 was cut in ahead of the mixed train's coaches on the rear, and was cut off at White Top to return to Bristol light. An M was rated for only 325 tons on the 3-percent grade up to White Top, and 10 loads of rock in 50-ton hoppers was roughly 850 of the 975 tons that three of them could handle.
After about 30 of these excursions with my grandfather, one day at West Jefferson I mustered up the courage to ask engineer Joe McNew if he'd let me ride the 429 back north. He said, "OK, but when we stop at White Top you drop off on my side (away from the depot) and go back to the rear end."
So I set up the drop seat on the fireman's side and took it all in as the West Jefferson switching was completed. We stopped to align the split-rail derail for our movement and again to put it back in derailing position. And then we were off.
It was downhill or level through Smethport, Warrensville, Bina, and Lansing, but, as we left Tuckerdale, White Top Mountain loomed ahead, and the 429 began to give out with that gruff, irritated bark (the antithesis of "cracking at the stack") that was familiar to me as the way an M used to describe just what was wrong and what it intended to do about it. Bristol Shop had her valves square, and she was speaking with authority. Fireman D.S. Nichols' work with the shovel had a rhythm of its own -- the chuck of the shovel going into the coal pile in the tender, the hiss of the air-operated Butterfly firedoors opening in response to Nichols' foot on the operating pedal, the clank of the heel of the shovel hitting the firedoor frame to spread the coal, and the loud clack of the door slamming shut after the shovel was withdrawn. Chuck-hiss-clank-clack-chuck-hiss-clank-clack chuck-hill-clank-clack.…
Let the music begin to play
As we passed the flag stop at Nella, the mountain started to get nasty (ruling grade: 2.5 percent) and McNew widened on the 429 -- that angry gruff bark increased mightily in volume. And Nichols' chuck-hiss-clank-clack stepped up its tempo. George Gershwin fans can talk about his song "Fascinatin' Rhythm" all they want, but it had nothing on the music I was hearing that bright summer day, on a half-century-old Twelve-Wheeler walking up White Top Mountain and telling the world what was going on in its own language, to the counterpoint of Nichols feeding his fire -- a symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.
Today, the Abingdon Branch is mostly a bike trail; the Bristol Ms are all gone except the 433 enshrined in the branch's namesake city; the crew members, including my grandfather and Joe McNew, have passed on.
Over the years, I grew to appreciate that these little engines had an interesting history. In 1906-07 the Norfolk & Western Railway obtained 125 4-8-0 locomotives to which it assigned the class letter "M." First to come were 50 from Baldwin numbered 450-499; the other 75, Nos. 375-449, came from American Locomotive Co.'s Richmond Works.
The 4-8-0 wheel arrangement found little favor among American railroads; at the same time N&W started receiving 4-8-0s, the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement, with its deeper firebox over a pair of carrying wheels, or trailer truck, was beginning to demonstrate advantages. But N&W liked to use the weight of the firebox for adhesion, so it raised the firebox over the last driving wheels and lengthened the front end of the boiler, providing a four-wheel leading truck for the weight of the boiler and for increased guidance in curves. The M was little more than an enlargement of N&W's class W-2 2-8-0, with more heating surface and slightly smaller grate area. It shared the 2-8-0's 200-pound boiler pressure, cylinders of 21-inch bore and 30-inch stroke, 56-inch drivers, and tractive effort of 40,163 pounds, less than most contemporary Consolidations of comparable weight. But it was a somewhat better steamer than the W-2, and was considered faster.
No cab deck, controls on the boiler side
The Ms, like all the Ws, had no cab deck behind the backhead. The firebox extended to the back of the cab, and the fireman baled coal while standing on the tender deck.
The engineer sat on a drop seat be side the firebox, and his utensils were arranged more or less conveniently up to his left. The throttle lever hung down over the shoulder of the firebox, and was directly connected to the throttle in the steam dome by an operating rod that passed through the front of the cab, above the boiler, and through a packing gland in the back of the dome. The reverse lever was in front of him against the side of the firebox with the water glass just above, and the injector controls -- a water valve, the overflow valve, and the operating lever -- were in front of him against the outer wall of the cab. His position might have been somewhat cramped, but his visibility to the front was superb. On the fireman's side, there was a drop seat for the times he could use it, a water glass, and injector controls arranged like the engineer's.
Like the W-2s, the Ms were equipped with piston valves arranged for inside admission operated by Stephenson valve gear; the valve rod was in the same vertical plane as the piston rod, evidently to minimize the length of the steam passages between the valve and the cylinder. N&W's use of these modern valves began before the turn of the 20th century. Where other railroads stayed with slide valves until the advent of superheating caused lubrication problems that made such valves obsolete around 1910 or so, the N&W owned 648 locomotives equipped with inside-admission piston valves before the first superheated locomotive hit the property.
N&W bought 100 M-1 4-8-0s (numbers 1000-1099) from Alco and Baldwin in i907; the big difference from the M was the application of a somewhat unsatisfactory design of Walschaerts valve gear, and the boiler check valves attached to a separate dome atop the boiler. The M-1s were all gone by 1947.
The Edwardian era was not a good one for steam locomotive aesthetics on the N&W. Contemporary locomotives on other railroads were beginning to bring pleasurable elements and balance to steam locomotive appearance, but N&W's typical (for the day) big cabs with 12 windowpanes on each side perched on the back end of wagon-top boilers with a drastic taper in the second course, behind a big old headlight mounted high on the smoke-box front doomed the Ms and M-1s from the start -- just like their N&W predecessor classes. They were born ugly and no re-arrangement of details ever made them any prettier; lowered headlights on some of them in later years helped, but not much.
To me, though, an M never was homely. It was home.
The reign of the M as the queen of N&W's freight power was brief; steam locomotive technology advanced rapidly in the era, and size mattered. Sixty-one larger 4-8-0s (classes M-2 and M-2a, b, and c) came in 1910-12 giving the N&W the continent's largest fleet -- 286 Twelve-Wheelers. Then the Mallet floodgates opened. One-hundred-ninety superheated 2-6-6-2s (classes Z-1 and Z-la) started coming in May 1912. It had taken locomotive designers less than six years to develop a machine that could do the work of a pair of Ms, and use a little less coal and a lot less water than the two 4-8-0s while doing it. (The 4-8-0 concept proved to be a dead end as far as locomotive technology was concerned; the M-2s were not as good as other roads' 2-8-2s of comparable weight, and no further expansion was possible with the firebox over the drivers.)
The Zs were just the beginning. The first Y-2 came in 1918 -- the sire of what would become the world's largest fleet of 2-8-8-2 Mallets.
The advent of each larger locomotive downgraded the Ms; local freights, work trains, branch lines and yard service were to be their homes from then on. Of course, by then they'd demonstrated their virtues; they were good steamers, lightfooted, and handled sharp curvature nicely. But by the mid-1920s there weren't enough homes for all of them and the Ws, too; scrappings began then and accelerated through the Depression-riddled 1930s.
Mighty tall assignment for the class M
Many Ms received Baker valve gear in the 1910s. The configuration of the valves directly over the pistons rather than being offset to the outside required the use of a rocker arm to get the motion from the outside of the wheels to the inboard vertical plane of the valve. This, in turn, required the combination lever to be hung from the vertical arm of the bell crank of the Baker valve gear and the union link to be aft of the crosshead, with the reach rod to the rocker arm attaching just below the bell crank connection. The action of the union link and combination lever was thus close enough to be visually combined with that of the eccentric crank and its rod to make a mesmerizing melange of motion.
Eight Ms (382,386,439,447,457,482,493,and 495) received superheaters in 1915. When the 386 and 493 were scrapped in the late '20s, their superheaters were applied to the 429 and 459. The superheated Ms were favored for the more demanding branch line and local freight services requiring locomotives with light axle loadings where a fair turn of speed was desired.
The terminus of the spectacular Abingdon Branch mixed train was moved from Abingdon to Bristol after World War II, and 15 miles of running on the fast Bristol line main was required as both a prelude and postlude to the twice-a-day battle with White Top Mountain (N&W's highest summit, at better than 3,500 feet). Thus, "a fair turn of speed" was desired. The 382,429, and 495 were sent .to Bristol for that service. In the mid-1950s the 382 and 429 were fitted with N&W-designed 20-ton, 12,000-gallon, 12-wheel tenders that had originally been constructed for Y-2 2-8-8-2s (the 495 was scrapped in 1953). Several other Ms without superheaters were assigned to Bristol as yard engines; a couple of them had the big tenders.
"Fair turn of speed"? The Bristol Line CTC dispatchers thought nothing of turning the V-C out of the west end of the siding at Abingdon while the Tennessean, all streamlined equipment and powered by a class J 4-8-4, was getting near the east end of the Abingdon siding, coming in to make its station stop. They expected the M would get over the high-speed hump east of Wyndale and go into Bristol without delaying the streamliner, and it would, too. Wyndale Hill was the last challenge for the fireman who'd already shoveled his way over N&W's highest summit twice. When the V-C was on time, the Tennessean wasn't close. But when the branch train was late, the M's fireman was in for some fast shoveling over Wyndale.
It's been about 50 years now since I got that ride on the 429 over White Top Mountain. Along the way, I've made a few of my own chuck-hiss-clank-clacks firing Southern steam excursions on Consolidation 630 and Mikado 4501 -- the language was the same but the dialect was different. Southern excursion engines weren't gruff; they cracked at the stack, in the traditional fashion of all Southern power -- a sassier sound. And Nichols' proficiency with the scoop shovel was an unreachable dream for me.
The memory of that day is still embedded in my mind, no doubt taking up room in my rapidly contracting cerebral capacity that should be available for more useful things. There's nothing I can do about that. It won't go away, and I don't want it to go away.
But wait a minute. Incredibly, there's an M actually running in 2006 at age 100. One of the 429's sisters, Baldwin 475, is operating on the Strasburg Rail Road in Pennsylvania, not far from her birthplace in Philadelphia.
I had never seen the 475 run; in my recollection, it had never been assigned to Bristol, and when N&W sent an M to Bristol, it stayed a while. The 475 spent the last days of N&W steam around Roanoke and Radford, Va., working "the Huckleberry" on the branch from Christiansburg to Blacksburg. But it had been selected to be decorated with brass embellishments and a fake diamond smokestack for Roanoke's centennial, and was sent to Bristol in that livery in 1956 to help celebrate that town's centennial, but hadn't been working.
Would it be possible for me to hear an M's fascinatin' rhythm again? It seemed just a matter of getting to Strasburg on the right day -- timing is everything. I attempted to make her acquaintance in October 2005, but the 475 had developed a leak around the beading of a flue in her firebox and was inside the shop, cooling down so the trouble could be repaired. So I had to be content with riding 2-10-0 No. 90 that fine day. And the 90 was a treat; she's a Baldwin standard Decapod similar to those I had ridden on Georgia short line Gainesville Midland back in the 1950s, and she brought back memories of her own. But she wasn't an N&W class M. I had to go back.
The next time around the 475 was sitting outside the shop, hot and ready to run, shining like new money in the bright November morning sun. Engineer Chuck Trusdell and Fireman Jeff Wienand made me welcome, and I set up the jump seat on the fireman's side.
On the road to Paradise … or Bristol?
Backing down to Paradise provided an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with-this little beast, and renew my thankfulness (echoed, no doubt, by every engineer and fireman that ever worked on an M) that she had efficient boiler lagging to keep the firebox heat from overpowering that cramped space. On the road back to Strasburg, though, I enjoyed the view out of the front of her cab -- only a Camelback or a Cab Forward could have had better visibility -- and remembered the drastic taper of the second boiler course. And when we left Cherry Hill after meeting Strasburg's second train, Trusdell made her talk a bit; for me, more than a half-century melted away. The gruff bark of the stack, the intermittent view of the side rods through the holes in the running board, the dance of the front end of the running board ahead of the air pump, the sound of the firedoor opening and closing -- it was all there. I confess: I wasn't keeping a lookout ahead. I had my ear pointed that way, not my eyes, listening again to that symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.
Now, Strasburg has done some customizing on the 475, because half her mileage is made backing up. The most obvious visual change is the relocation of the injectors from outboard of the No. 4 drivers to aft of them, so they can be operated from controls near the step up into the cab, to the rear of the seats. The independent and automatic air brake valves have been moved back to be more convenient for backing-up operation. N&W had done some modifications on her USRA 10,000-gallon tender to adapt it to hand firing. It had come to the railroad behind a class K-2 4-8-2 that was, of course, equipped with a stoker. (Being that the K-2 was passenger power, that tender has some fast miles on it.) The left side water leg had been trimmed back in order to give the fireman room to swing his scoop. None of these alterations count in the end, though -- she's still what she was 50 years ago when she earned her keep on a roster full of the most modern steam locomotives around.
Because the cab straddles the rear end of the boiler and the accommodations are so cramped, the 475 will never be the crew favorite at Strasburg; she's just not that handy to work, especially compared to that 2-10-0 with its "living room"-sized cab. She's earned the reputation, though, as the best steamer on the property.
The hospitality of Linn Moedinger, Rick Musser, and Trusdell and Jeff Wienand of the Strasburg made it possible for this old guy to put the lie, at least to an extent, to author Thomas Wolfe. You can go home again.
By: King, Ed, Trains, Aug2006
I became acquainted with Norfolk & Western's class M 4-8-0s at an early age. I was boosted into the cab of No. 467 at Bristol Shop before I was old enough for grammar school. I didn't know what I was looking at, except that there was a lot of heat from that open firedoor. But I was hooked.
Witnessing these rare (though I didn't realize how rare at the time) little creatures going about their business in the yard in my home town of Bristol, Va., and coming and going on the Abingdon Branch mixed train (often called the "V-C" after the Virginia-Carolina Railway that built the Branch, and sometimes called "The Carolina Queen") was as educational as it was fascinating.
Bristol Yard was not the only place I got to watch these engines. My grandfather spent the last 14 years of his career as express messenger on the "V-C", and I made many trips with him on his run. Over the years, I rode behind Ms 382, 429, 495, and several doubleheaders: 382 and 429; 382 and 396 (a non-superheated Bristol yard engine that branch crews hated because it worked the fireman harder -he had to shovel more coal to produce the power of the superheated engines); 429 and 495; and 382 and 429 with the 433 (another Bristol yard engine) pushing. The N&W used the three-engine train to haul rock to a highway project in North Carolina. The 433 was cut in ahead of the mixed train's coaches on the rear, and was cut off at White Top to return to Bristol light. An M was rated for only 325 tons on the 3-percent grade up to White Top, and 10 loads of rock in 50-ton hoppers was roughly 850 of the 975 tons that three of them could handle.
After about 30 of these excursions with my grandfather, one day at West Jefferson I mustered up the courage to ask engineer Joe McNew if he'd let me ride the 429 back north. He said, "OK, but when we stop at White Top you drop off on my side (away from the depot) and go back to the rear end."
So I set up the drop seat on the fireman's side and took it all in as the West Jefferson switching was completed. We stopped to align the split-rail derail for our movement and again to put it back in derailing position. And then we were off.
It was downhill or level through Smethport, Warrensville, Bina, and Lansing, but, as we left Tuckerdale, White Top Mountain loomed ahead, and the 429 began to give out with that gruff, irritated bark (the antithesis of "cracking at the stack") that was familiar to me as the way an M used to describe just what was wrong and what it intended to do about it. Bristol Shop had her valves square, and she was speaking with authority. Fireman D.S. Nichols' work with the shovel had a rhythm of its own -- the chuck of the shovel going into the coal pile in the tender, the hiss of the air-operated Butterfly firedoors opening in response to Nichols' foot on the operating pedal, the clank of the heel of the shovel hitting the firedoor frame to spread the coal, and the loud clack of the door slamming shut after the shovel was withdrawn. Chuck-hiss-clank-clack-chuck-hiss-clank-clack chuck-hill-clank-clack.…
Let the music begin to play
As we passed the flag stop at Nella, the mountain started to get nasty (ruling grade: 2.5 percent) and McNew widened on the 429 -- that angry gruff bark increased mightily in volume. And Nichols' chuck-hiss-clank-clack stepped up its tempo. George Gershwin fans can talk about his song "Fascinatin' Rhythm" all they want, but it had nothing on the music I was hearing that bright summer day, on a half-century-old Twelve-Wheeler walking up White Top Mountain and telling the world what was going on in its own language, to the counterpoint of Nichols feeding his fire -- a symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.
Today, the Abingdon Branch is mostly a bike trail; the Bristol Ms are all gone except the 433 enshrined in the branch's namesake city; the crew members, including my grandfather and Joe McNew, have passed on.
Over the years, I grew to appreciate that these little engines had an interesting history. In 1906-07 the Norfolk & Western Railway obtained 125 4-8-0 locomotives to which it assigned the class letter "M." First to come were 50 from Baldwin numbered 450-499; the other 75, Nos. 375-449, came from American Locomotive Co.'s Richmond Works.
The 4-8-0 wheel arrangement found little favor among American railroads; at the same time N&W started receiving 4-8-0s, the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement, with its deeper firebox over a pair of carrying wheels, or trailer truck, was beginning to demonstrate advantages. But N&W liked to use the weight of the firebox for adhesion, so it raised the firebox over the last driving wheels and lengthened the front end of the boiler, providing a four-wheel leading truck for the weight of the boiler and for increased guidance in curves. The M was little more than an enlargement of N&W's class W-2 2-8-0, with more heating surface and slightly smaller grate area. It shared the 2-8-0's 200-pound boiler pressure, cylinders of 21-inch bore and 30-inch stroke, 56-inch drivers, and tractive effort of 40,163 pounds, less than most contemporary Consolidations of comparable weight. But it was a somewhat better steamer than the W-2, and was considered faster.
No cab deck, controls on the boiler side
The Ms, like all the Ws, had no cab deck behind the backhead. The firebox extended to the back of the cab, and the fireman baled coal while standing on the tender deck.
The engineer sat on a drop seat be side the firebox, and his utensils were arranged more or less conveniently up to his left. The throttle lever hung down over the shoulder of the firebox, and was directly connected to the throttle in the steam dome by an operating rod that passed through the front of the cab, above the boiler, and through a packing gland in the back of the dome. The reverse lever was in front of him against the side of the firebox with the water glass just above, and the injector controls -- a water valve, the overflow valve, and the operating lever -- were in front of him against the outer wall of the cab. His position might have been somewhat cramped, but his visibility to the front was superb. On the fireman's side, there was a drop seat for the times he could use it, a water glass, and injector controls arranged like the engineer's.
Like the W-2s, the Ms were equipped with piston valves arranged for inside admission operated by Stephenson valve gear; the valve rod was in the same vertical plane as the piston rod, evidently to minimize the length of the steam passages between the valve and the cylinder. N&W's use of these modern valves began before the turn of the 20th century. Where other railroads stayed with slide valves until the advent of superheating caused lubrication problems that made such valves obsolete around 1910 or so, the N&W owned 648 locomotives equipped with inside-admission piston valves before the first superheated locomotive hit the property.
N&W bought 100 M-1 4-8-0s (numbers 1000-1099) from Alco and Baldwin in i907; the big difference from the M was the application of a somewhat unsatisfactory design of Walschaerts valve gear, and the boiler check valves attached to a separate dome atop the boiler. The M-1s were all gone by 1947.
The Edwardian era was not a good one for steam locomotive aesthetics on the N&W. Contemporary locomotives on other railroads were beginning to bring pleasurable elements and balance to steam locomotive appearance, but N&W's typical (for the day) big cabs with 12 windowpanes on each side perched on the back end of wagon-top boilers with a drastic taper in the second course, behind a big old headlight mounted high on the smoke-box front doomed the Ms and M-1s from the start -- just like their N&W predecessor classes. They were born ugly and no re-arrangement of details ever made them any prettier; lowered headlights on some of them in later years helped, but not much.
To me, though, an M never was homely. It was home.
The reign of the M as the queen of N&W's freight power was brief; steam locomotive technology advanced rapidly in the era, and size mattered. Sixty-one larger 4-8-0s (classes M-2 and M-2a, b, and c) came in 1910-12 giving the N&W the continent's largest fleet -- 286 Twelve-Wheelers. Then the Mallet floodgates opened. One-hundred-ninety superheated 2-6-6-2s (classes Z-1 and Z-la) started coming in May 1912. It had taken locomotive designers less than six years to develop a machine that could do the work of a pair of Ms, and use a little less coal and a lot less water than the two 4-8-0s while doing it. (The 4-8-0 concept proved to be a dead end as far as locomotive technology was concerned; the M-2s were not as good as other roads' 2-8-2s of comparable weight, and no further expansion was possible with the firebox over the drivers.)
The Zs were just the beginning. The first Y-2 came in 1918 -- the sire of what would become the world's largest fleet of 2-8-8-2 Mallets.
The advent of each larger locomotive downgraded the Ms; local freights, work trains, branch lines and yard service were to be their homes from then on. Of course, by then they'd demonstrated their virtues; they were good steamers, lightfooted, and handled sharp curvature nicely. But by the mid-1920s there weren't enough homes for all of them and the Ws, too; scrappings began then and accelerated through the Depression-riddled 1930s.
Mighty tall assignment for the class M
Many Ms received Baker valve gear in the 1910s. The configuration of the valves directly over the pistons rather than being offset to the outside required the use of a rocker arm to get the motion from the outside of the wheels to the inboard vertical plane of the valve. This, in turn, required the combination lever to be hung from the vertical arm of the bell crank of the Baker valve gear and the union link to be aft of the crosshead, with the reach rod to the rocker arm attaching just below the bell crank connection. The action of the union link and combination lever was thus close enough to be visually combined with that of the eccentric crank and its rod to make a mesmerizing melange of motion.
Eight Ms (382,386,439,447,457,482,493,and 495) received superheaters in 1915. When the 386 and 493 were scrapped in the late '20s, their superheaters were applied to the 429 and 459. The superheated Ms were favored for the more demanding branch line and local freight services requiring locomotives with light axle loadings where a fair turn of speed was desired.
The terminus of the spectacular Abingdon Branch mixed train was moved from Abingdon to Bristol after World War II, and 15 miles of running on the fast Bristol line main was required as both a prelude and postlude to the twice-a-day battle with White Top Mountain (N&W's highest summit, at better than 3,500 feet). Thus, "a fair turn of speed" was desired. The 382,429, and 495 were sent .to Bristol for that service. In the mid-1950s the 382 and 429 were fitted with N&W-designed 20-ton, 12,000-gallon, 12-wheel tenders that had originally been constructed for Y-2 2-8-8-2s (the 495 was scrapped in 1953). Several other Ms without superheaters were assigned to Bristol as yard engines; a couple of them had the big tenders.
"Fair turn of speed"? The Bristol Line CTC dispatchers thought nothing of turning the V-C out of the west end of the siding at Abingdon while the Tennessean, all streamlined equipment and powered by a class J 4-8-4, was getting near the east end of the Abingdon siding, coming in to make its station stop. They expected the M would get over the high-speed hump east of Wyndale and go into Bristol without delaying the streamliner, and it would, too. Wyndale Hill was the last challenge for the fireman who'd already shoveled his way over N&W's highest summit twice. When the V-C was on time, the Tennessean wasn't close. But when the branch train was late, the M's fireman was in for some fast shoveling over Wyndale.
It's been about 50 years now since I got that ride on the 429 over White Top Mountain. Along the way, I've made a few of my own chuck-hiss-clank-clacks firing Southern steam excursions on Consolidation 630 and Mikado 4501 -- the language was the same but the dialect was different. Southern excursion engines weren't gruff; they cracked at the stack, in the traditional fashion of all Southern power -- a sassier sound. And Nichols' proficiency with the scoop shovel was an unreachable dream for me.
The memory of that day is still embedded in my mind, no doubt taking up room in my rapidly contracting cerebral capacity that should be available for more useful things. There's nothing I can do about that. It won't go away, and I don't want it to go away.
But wait a minute. Incredibly, there's an M actually running in 2006 at age 100. One of the 429's sisters, Baldwin 475, is operating on the Strasburg Rail Road in Pennsylvania, not far from her birthplace in Philadelphia.
I had never seen the 475 run; in my recollection, it had never been assigned to Bristol, and when N&W sent an M to Bristol, it stayed a while. The 475 spent the last days of N&W steam around Roanoke and Radford, Va., working "the Huckleberry" on the branch from Christiansburg to Blacksburg. But it had been selected to be decorated with brass embellishments and a fake diamond smokestack for Roanoke's centennial, and was sent to Bristol in that livery in 1956 to help celebrate that town's centennial, but hadn't been working.
Would it be possible for me to hear an M's fascinatin' rhythm again? It seemed just a matter of getting to Strasburg on the right day -- timing is everything. I attempted to make her acquaintance in October 2005, but the 475 had developed a leak around the beading of a flue in her firebox and was inside the shop, cooling down so the trouble could be repaired. So I had to be content with riding 2-10-0 No. 90 that fine day. And the 90 was a treat; she's a Baldwin standard Decapod similar to those I had ridden on Georgia short line Gainesville Midland back in the 1950s, and she brought back memories of her own. But she wasn't an N&W class M. I had to go back.
The next time around the 475 was sitting outside the shop, hot and ready to run, shining like new money in the bright November morning sun. Engineer Chuck Trusdell and Fireman Jeff Wienand made me welcome, and I set up the jump seat on the fireman's side.
On the road to Paradise … or Bristol?
Backing down to Paradise provided an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with-this little beast, and renew my thankfulness (echoed, no doubt, by every engineer and fireman that ever worked on an M) that she had efficient boiler lagging to keep the firebox heat from overpowering that cramped space. On the road back to Strasburg, though, I enjoyed the view out of the front of her cab -- only a Camelback or a Cab Forward could have had better visibility -- and remembered the drastic taper of the second boiler course. And when we left Cherry Hill after meeting Strasburg's second train, Trusdell made her talk a bit; for me, more than a half-century melted away. The gruff bark of the stack, the intermittent view of the side rods through the holes in the running board, the dance of the front end of the running board ahead of the air pump, the sound of the firedoor opening and closing -- it was all there. I confess: I wasn't keeping a lookout ahead. I had my ear pointed that way, not my eyes, listening again to that symphony for twelve wheels and a scoop shovel.
Now, Strasburg has done some customizing on the 475, because half her mileage is made backing up. The most obvious visual change is the relocation of the injectors from outboard of the No. 4 drivers to aft of them, so they can be operated from controls near the step up into the cab, to the rear of the seats. The independent and automatic air brake valves have been moved back to be more convenient for backing-up operation. N&W had done some modifications on her USRA 10,000-gallon tender to adapt it to hand firing. It had come to the railroad behind a class K-2 4-8-2 that was, of course, equipped with a stoker. (Being that the K-2 was passenger power, that tender has some fast miles on it.) The left side water leg had been trimmed back in order to give the fireman room to swing his scoop. None of these alterations count in the end, though -- she's still what she was 50 years ago when she earned her keep on a roster full of the most modern steam locomotives around.
Because the cab straddles the rear end of the boiler and the accommodations are so cramped, the 475 will never be the crew favorite at Strasburg; she's just not that handy to work, especially compared to that 2-10-0 with its "living room"-sized cab. She's earned the reputation, though, as the best steamer on the property.
The hospitality of Linn Moedinger, Rick Musser, and Trusdell and Jeff Wienand of the Strasburg made it possible for this old guy to put the lie, at least to an extent, to author Thomas Wolfe. You can go home again.
By: King, Ed, Trains, Aug2006
posted by James at 9:09 PM
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