If he had been able to continue with the development of steam on the SNCF, Chapelon would have pushed ahead with designs for triple-expansion four-cylinder versions of his 6,000 ihp, three-cylinder compound locomotives. The 4-8-4 would have been more powerful than any locomotives of this wheel arrangement built in the United States. A very high pressure – 584 psi – boiler with water-tube fire-box would generate saturated steam passed to an inside steam-jacketed high-pressure cylinder driving the third coupled axle. This would feed the medium-pressure cylinder set between two low-pressure cylinders driving the second coupled axle. Steam would be superheated between the high- and medium-pressure cylinders, and re-superheated between the single medium and twin low-pressure cylinders. This might sound complex, but it would have remained a simpler machine than a diesel locomotive; basically, any steam engine is a relatively straightforward device, with remarkably few moving parts. The result was to have been an express engine, and other types, capable of exerting a sustained 6,000 dbhp and around 7,500 ihp. This design, Chapelon said in 1970: ‘shows the development of the classic steam locomotive that was still possible if work had continued since 1945 during these twenty-five years that have been wasted on the Diesel’.
It seems sad that in his lifetime Chapelon should have come under attack from rivals jealous of his success, as well as from those who insisted, in the face of the evidence, that compounds were undesirable simply because they seemed to be complex in comparison with the ideal of simple and rugged locomotives favoured in the English-speaking world. In his World Steam in the Twentieth Century, Stewart Cox noted: ‘In the case of the engines having the highest power-to-weight ratio of all, the Chapelon 4-8-0s of class 240P, turned out in 1940, and set to work on the PLM main line, a remarkably short life ensued before the engines had to be taken out of service due to mechanical deterioration.’ This was untrue and clearly a case of wish-fulfilment on the part of a British engineer who, although probably misinformed by SNCF engineers, believed in simplicity at all times. Nevertheless, to his credit, Cox did add: ‘It is sufficiently clear that in relation to the size of the machines concerned, they [Chapelon’s compounds] were unmatched anywhere else in the world both in their contribution to brilliant running and in the elegance with which it was achieved.’
It was Chapelon, a touch ironically, who ultimately helped rescue the underperforming British Railways Standard Pacific 71000 Duke of Gloucester. On a visit to the Rugby testing plant in 1957, he analysed the report on the tests made with the Duke and advised a change in the profile of the exhaust cams to increase the power developed in the cylinders. Nothing happened at the time, but when Duke of Gloucester was rebuilt for main-line running in the 1990s, the opportunity was taken by Tom Daniels, the 78-year-old engineering adviser to the restoration project, to follow Chapelon’s advice; as always, this proved to be highly effective. Daniels was also able to fit 71000 with double Kylchap exhausts, just as Chapelon had recommended forty years earlier, and this has significantly boosted Duke of Gloucester’s performance. In any case, every British steam locomotive engineer worth his weight in coal and water had adopted Chapelon’s ideas on ‘internal streamlining’, or the unrestricted flow of steam from regulator to cylinders, while his Kylchap exhaust was second to none in raising the performance of locomotives that had yet to reach their potential.
Chapelon’s passion for steam and his overriding belief that there was a future for the steam locomotive, if only it were developed to anything like its full potential, remained with him until his death in 1978. In the 1970s he worked, with assistance from George Carpenter, on designs for new steam locomotives for American railroads. This collaboration was in response to the oil crisis of the time when, for a while, it really did look as if some railroads might consider returning to steam locomotives burning indigenous coal. That crisis has never really passed; the USA has been plunged into wars triggered by the struggle over the production and supply of oil. The steam locomotive still has its place. There was also a discussion in 1974, agreed to by Chapelon, with the Chinese National Railways, led by Kenneth Cantlie, former consultant engineer to the Chinese National Railways, over the possible construction of 152Ps. The Chinese showed great interest in locomotives 30 per cent more powerful than their robust, 3,500 ihp, QJ class 2-10-2, still very much in production at the time. However, the ministry of heavy machine production, which controlled Datong works where the QJs were built, stated that retooling for the 152P would cost a year’s delay in production, or three thousand new locomotives, a figure the railway was unable to contemplate. It is fascinating, however, to see that Chapelon’s design was still being considered for production twenty years after his retirement; had it happened, it would have given him great satisfaction.
Chapelon was not the only French locomotive engineer of merit in the age of super-power steam. His friend Marc de Caso designed some very fine engines, not least the seventy-two powerful 2-8-2 TC class tank engines built from 1932, which many of us can remember from our first trips to Paris, busy at work on the push-pull suburban trains running in and out of the Gare du Nord. These had remarkable powers of acceleration. Chapelon, however, had taken the steam railway locomotive to new heights; and he demonstrated that, as the politics of fuel become ever more important, steam is far from being finished.
Sentimental passéiste or painstaking and passionate innovator? André Chapelon was quite clearly the latter, and over his long career he was to gain many more admirers than detractors. This heart-felt appreciation, offered by the SNCF steam locomotive engineer Jean Gillot, who had taken Chapelon’s traction course at the École Centrale, seems as fitting a tribute as any: ‘Whilst his work was immortal, one realizes that the man himself was not. When one met him and until the end of his life he was always straightforward and modest, with his lively mind and wonderful memory, his clear and vivid speech and the little flame that seemed to light up in his eyes when he spoke of “the locomotive” . . . his departure marked the end of a glorious epoch of the steam locomotive which reached its ultimate development thanks to him because he was its greatest worldwide craftsman.’
CHAPTER 4
THE UNITED STATES
Big Boys, Bright Lights, and Dream Tickets
It was someone in the Schenectady erecting shops who chalked the legend ‘Big Boy’ across the frames of the biggest locomotive Alco had ever been asked to build. Alco was the American Locomotive Company, Schenectady the upstate New York town where steam trains had first run, to nearby Albany, in 1831. Over the ensuing 110 years, railroads had spread their steel web the length and breadth of the United States. The most extensive of all, now as then, was the Union Pacific Railroad. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the Union Pacific ran trains west of the Mississippi and out in a great fork as far as Seattle and Los Angeles on the Pacific coast.
In shifting prodigious quantities of freight from west to east and east to west, Union Pacific trains had no alternative but to climb some of the steepest gills between the Rockies and the Appalachians. The most notorious sections of its tracks were between Ogden, Utah, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Running east from Ogden (elevation 4,355 feet), trains were faced with a 62 mile climb to a summit at 6,799 feet. Heading west from Cheyenne (elevation 6,060 feet) they faced a 30 mile climb to the top of Sherman Hill (8,013 feet). This would have been tough going for a lightweight streamlined express in the years immediately before the Second World War, but for the massive freight trains needed to fuel the American war effort, these climbs demanded a herculean effort on the part of Union Pacific locomotives. And imagine these great mountainous plains in the white depths of winter: the challenge they posed to railroad engineers was formidable.
But this was where, late in the day, the American steam locomotive came to the rescue, making one of its last supreme efforts before the oil and diesel lobby forced it into retirement. Big Boy would be a veritable wonder – not the biggest, or the heaviest, or even the most powerful of steam locomotives, but in terms of speed,
usable power, availability and flexibility, one of the mightiest of them all.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Union Pacific had specified ever bigger locomotives to deal with the Wahsatch and Sherman Hills. Its three-cylinder 4-12-2 class, built between 1926 and 1930, was a good slogger but not particularly fast, and it was unable to cope single-handedly with the loads expected in wartime. The Challenger class 4-6-6-4 of 1936–44 was a maid-of-all-work, able to run at 70 mph and to manage both passenger and heavy freight trains; yet even these bravura machines had to be assisted by a second locomotive over the formidable Utah and Wyoming peaks.
The Union Pacific wanted freight trains of at least 3,600 tons (something like 110 fully laden modern British railway carriages) worked by a single locomotive and crew over the gradients that challenged their Challengers. This made economic sense, especially in wartime when manpower was inevitably going to be in short supply. This was why, in just three short and very intensive months in 1940, the company vice president in charge of research, Otto Jabelmann, working with Robert Ennis and A. I. Lipetz at Alco, drew up the specification and design for the 4000 class, the one and only 4-8-8-4 type ever built. To ensure a rapid turnaround of locomotives, freight cars, and crews, these giant new locomotives would need to run fast. In fact, the 345 ton engines (535 tons with tender) could top 80 mph when pressed or on test, although 60 mph was a more normal maximum.
In Big Boy – and this was the key to its success – the Union Pacific had produced not some muscle-bound monster, but a remarkably lithe machine, rather like a sixteen-stone marathon runner, or a heavyweight boxer able to dance around the ring for an entire match. Twenty-five were built, in two batches – in 1941 and 1944 – at a cost of $256,000 each. To put the sheer scale of Big Boy into international perspective, consider the dimensions of the largest, latest, and most powerful British freight engine, the British Railways class 9F 2-10-0 built between 1954 and 1960. A Big Boy weighed 345 tons, a 9F 86 tons. Big Boy had a nominal tractive effort of 135,375 lb, compared with the 9F’s 39,670 lb. Big Boy could sustain 6,290 dbhp at 35 mph, or around 7,500 ihp; the figures for a 9F were about one third of those. At 132 ft 9¼ in, Big Boy was twice as long as its British cousin. It was also much wider and far taller than a 9F.
Inside Big Boy’s enormous boiler, pressed to 300 psi, there was over a mile of tubes and flues to heat. The fire-box measured 150 sq ft. If you had been able to endure the intense heat (2,500 °F), you could have held a cocktail party inside. The vast grate swallowed low-grade Wyoming coal, mined close to Union Pacific tracks, shovelled automatically through two steam-powered stokers from Big Boy’s fourteen-wheeled tender. The tender was loaded with 28 tons of coal and 24,000 gallons of water; at full blast, a Big Boy had a huge appetite, working its way through this seemingly generous supply in just 55 miles.
In full cry, the 4-8-8-4s – and you can hear this in Union Pacific’s own homage to the articulated locomotives, the handsome black-and-white film Big Boy, made in 1958 – sounded like a fast-moving thunderstorm or a continuous broadside from a battleship, as, with exhaust roaring from triple blast-pipes and chimneys, they took 4,200 ton loads (well above their design specification) east and west over the hills they were built to flatten. Built for this single purpose, the black and silver 4000 class did exactly what it was mean to do, reliably and poetically, until the summer of 1959, when diesels took over. No individual diesel could possibly match the power of a Big Boy, especially at speed, but several easy-to-service diesels could be coupled together in series and manned by a single crew – a gang of Davids to the steam engine’s Goliath. A number of Big Boys were kept steaming until 1962, by which time each of the original batch had run more than one million trouble-free miles and the US railroads were effectively 99 per cent steam-free. Eight of the twenty-five have been spared the cutter’s torch and yet – oddly, considering the enthusiasm for steam in the USA and the phenomenal wealth in that country – none is in running order. If it were, enthusiasts and camera crews would flock from around the world to see it.
Big Boy captured much of the spirit, and framed much of the substance, of American super-power steam. Visitors to North America were generally dumbfounded at first by the sheer size of steam locomotives in the United States and Canada. But, once they began fully to appreciate the scale of the dramatic landscape of the continent, locomotives like the Union Pacific Big Boys began to make sense. For all their might and splendour, the Big Boys were very much in a minority of US steam locomotives; where Big Boy was built for a specific route, the majority of American engines were generic, big, simple, strong machines which, except for differences in design details, liveries, and logos, could easily be mistaken for one another. In spite of there being so many private railroad companies, many of the best US steam locomotives were not just very similar in design, but they were built, for the most part, by a tiny handful of companies, the names of which – Alco, Baldwin, and Lima – are world-famous. Very few US railroads built their own locomotives, preferring to buy them from the major builders, although a number of companies did have strong and sometimes imaginative design teams who worked with engine builders to get what they felt they needed.
Otto Jabelmann was one of those railroad engineers, who worked closely with Alco to produce not just one but three of the great locomotives of the super-power steam era. These were the FEF (‘four-eight-four’) two-cylinder 4-8-4s of 1937–44, the later versions of the Challenger four-cylinder 4-6-6-4s of 1941–47, and the Big Boys of 1941–44. The FEFs were built in three batches, each an improvement on the first. It remains a wonder that FEF-3 844, the last of the series, and the last steam locomotive to be built for the Union Pacific, has never been retired from service. Today, this superb machine continues to run special passenger trains, and the occasional freight service, throughout and beyond the Union Pacific’s extensive network. Designed for 100 mph running, and capable of at least 110 mph, this 5,500 ihp locomotive weighs 220 tons, its two 25 × 32 in cylinders packing a colossal 50 ton punch as they move trains away from rest.
On 14 March 1990, 844 worked a train of US veterans to Abilene in Kansas as part of the hundredth anniversary celebrations of the birth of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe at the time of D-Day, when the Union Pacific 4-8-4 was taking shape at Schenectady. There it stood close by the Gresley A4 Pacific 60008 Dwight D. Eisenhower; the British locomotive looked liked an 00-scale model in comparison. Everything about US locomotives and US railroading was built on a heroic scale, as if these companies and the machines that worked them were an outward sign of the American belief in ‘manifest destiny’ as the nation explored and conquered territory after territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast.
Jabelmann was a big character in every way. Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he joined the Union Pacific at the age of sixteen. His first job was to wake up crews to get them to the roundhouse on time. Working his way up the ranks, and with four years out to study mechanical engineering at Michigan and Stanford universities, Jabelmann rose from roundhouse superintendent at Cheyenne to become the Union Pacific’s assistant general superintendent of motive power and machinery and, in 1936, head of a newly established department of research and mechanical standards; he became a vice president of the company in 1939.
‘He was not endowed,’ said a Union Pacific obituary, ‘with the gift of eloquence and the results he accomplished were through tireless toil, indomitable courage, and an amazing intellect that won the respect and admiration of his legion of friends and associates.’ In his swashbuckling and detailed history of the Union Pacific, Maury Klein describes Jabelmann as ‘a tough, dour mechanical genius’, a burly man with a prominent nose, ‘who fired people almost as fast as Jeffers [Union Pacific’s president] when they didn’t meet his exacting standards’. The impression is of one of those people known, for better or worse, as ‘forces of nature’. One Union Pacific shop-man described him as ‘very, very bright’ but ‘probably the meanest man that was ever i
n the mechanical department’. Another recalled: ‘He’d come in there and you better know what you was talkin’ about. If you didn’t, you was going to get your butt reamed.’
Working sixty-hour weeks, Jabelmann was on a mission, led by the railroad’s dynamic William M. Jeffers. The son of first-generation Irish immigrants, Jeffers had started out, like Jabelmann, as a ‘caller’ at the tender age of fourteen; the two men were naturally close. The Union Pacific had been reconstituted in 1936, when the company took in a number of smaller railroads, and the following year Jeffers became president. Keen to create a highly effective modern railway, Jeffers took a keen interest not just in the way in which the Union Pacific performed, but in the way it looked. Its armour-yellow internal-combustion streamliners, black and anthracite steam locomotives, and the exemplary modern graphics it applied to both engines and trains, date from this period.
Jabelmann was not exclusively a steam man; what interested him was efficiency. He played a key role in the design of the Union Pacific’s first streamliner, the M-10000 City of Salina, before he got a grip on the articulated freight locomotives and the 4-8-4s. A 100 mph lightweight aluminium Pullman, which toured sixty-eight US cities and was seen by over a million people before it went into service in 1934 between Kansas City and Salina, the City of Salina was a glimpse of a future that never quite took off. Powered by a 600 hp Winton distilled-fuel engine – diesel-electrics were on the way – this bright-yellow train made a big publicity splash and was followed by seven more Union Pacific streamliners, yet it was never really more than a sideshow. It was scrapped in 1942. Jabelmann’s research department was staffed with experts in alloys, fuels, and lubricants. When the United States went to war in 1941, the Union Pacific was to play a major role working essential supply trains from the west to the east coast; the reliability as well as the sheer power of its new locomotives were the product of good initial design combined with expert maintenance, using the latest tools, techniques, and materials, some derived from experience with new forms of motive power and traction.
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