THE STEAM LOCOMOTIVE

Ypsilanti, Michigan 48197.

Perhaps no other item of commercial transportation machinery, as
exemplified by the steam locomotive, has ever created the
wonderment, the awe, the entertainment and ‘show qualities’
that the steam locomotive has throughout its evolution from a small
crude vertical-boiler outfit to the large, intricate and
complicated monsters that they eventually became by the time of the
termination of their economic usefulness. Up to comparatively near
the last days of its economic utility, the steam locomotive was the
most rapid specimen of land space-covering capacity mechanism in
existence, although at the time of its early invention, on one
occasion, it lost out in a race with a horse! It must be noted that
the earliest railway cars were first moved by horses. Also the
early canal boats were powered by horses. As steam locomotive
power, for early railroad transportation, eventually became
substituted for horse power, the steam locomotive naturally earned
a permanent sobriquet, ‘The Iron Horse’ a sobriquet
manifesting a superior potential power capacity and speed
achievement rather than any pictorial or organic resemblance.

The early locomotives were fired with wood, and wood continued
to be the universal fuel, due, at the time, to quantity and
availability, for quite a number of years after the Civil War.
However, as power demands became greater, locomotives converted to
coal-burners while some of the very last locomotives were fired
with oil. With the latest very large locomotives, the greater grate
and heating surface required an hourly coal consumption of 65,000
pounds, or 75,000 pounds under extreme conditions. Consequently, in
the largest locomotives mechanical stokers were a positive
necessity to replace the hand-firing method.

While there was a constant and progressive mechanical
improvement in locomotive design and construction, yet there was
one model that served quite consistently throughout a number of
years years prior to the Civil War and well past the ‘Gay
Nineties’ and into quite a bit of the 20th century. It served
throughout the wood-burning era and deep into the coal-firing
stage. This model with a wheel-arrangement of 4-4-0 and a Stephen
link-motion valve gear, was universally known as ‘The American
Standard’ type of locomotive. In its time, it served most
efficiently as a general ‘all-around work-horse’ for every
variety of railroad service. It served equally efficient as a
switch engine, a light freight engine and a fast passenger engine.
It was especially adapted for fast passenger serve as its design
permitted great speed rather than attractive and pulling capacity.
It broke all records in the matter of speed.

Due to the later development and competition of the
passenger-carrying airplanes, the interstate bus-passenger service
and the great number of privately owned automobiles,
railroad-passenger service patronage diminished to such a low ebb
as to cause the passenger-service division to operate financially
‘in the red.’ To recoup for this financial loss of
passenger revenue and to remain financially solvent, it was
necessary, as a pure economic justification, to cut passenger
service to its absolute minimum, and increase the profit-producing
freight service to its absolute limits, which, in materialistic
economics, meant bigger and longer freight trains, and which
required bigger and more powerful locomotives to haul the longer
trains.

It is patiently evident, due to structural limitations that
‘The American Standard’ type of locomotive would seriously
lack sufficient attractive power to pull the excessively longer
freight trains. To accomplish this objective it was necessary to
get a greater number of drive wheels in contact with the rails and
with power sufficient to turn them to the capacity of their
tractive potential. This meant locomotives with larger grate and
heating surfaces. Due to structural limiting factors, this
additional demand could be met only by lengthening the locomotive
boiler to a considerable extent. To expedite this requirement, it
was evident that the typical motive-power equipment – two steam
cylinders and other necessary driving equipment – was not feasible
structurally and mechanically power-producing to utilize fully the
extra power-producing capacity of the elongated boiler. To meet the
contingencies of extra capacity, a new design of the mechanical
power equipment was effected by installing a second power unit an
exact duplication of the power unit that is customarily under the
boiler – thus, making a power-combination of four steam cylinders;
and therefore, making it possible for a locomotive to have a
maximum of twenty drive wheels. This new type of locomotive was
classified as an ‘Articulated Mallet Locomotive.’ A
locomotive of this monstrous size, with two lead wheels and two
trailer wheels, would have a wheel arrangement listed as 2-10-10-2,
with each drive-wheel load being between 25,000 lbs. and 33,000
lbs., and having a gross power rating of 6,000 horsepower.