The latest design ideas and technical achievements were used during the construction. This wonderful steam locomotive was built in Pennsylvania, at Altoona Works, and in addition to its own engineers, PRR attracted specialists from three US steam locomotive "whales": ALCO, Baldwin and Lima. Engineer Ralph Johnson of Baldwin is the author of the PRR S1 scheme, and the Art Deco look is a credit to Raymond Lowy.
Raymond Lowy with * his locomotive * in the background.
Johnson proposed reducing the stress on moving parts by installing four cylinders, not two: each pair rotated two driving wheelsets. At the same time, with this arrangement, the tasks of increasing tractive effort and increasing reliability were fulfilled. Unlike the following duplexes, the S1 was built on a rigid frame. This locomotive had a unique wheel arrangement: 6-4-4-6, and the wheel diameter was the largest among all American steam locomotives: two meters thirteen centimeters.
S1 arrives at Crestline station and it's a * real show * (so on their website:))
The tender (class 250-P-84) could carry twenty-four tons of coal and ninety tons of water. The length of the PRR S1 with the tender exceeded the length of the Big Boy and was 42.67 m (the locomotive itself was 23.7 m plus the tender 18.97 m). The locomotive weighed four hundred and ninety tons (two hundred and eighty-five - a locomotive and two hundred and five - a tender). Almost six hundred seventy thousand dollars were spent on the construction.
At the New York Exhibition in 1939.
Immediately after construction, PRR S1 participated in the World's Fair in New York, and then was supposed to start servicing the Chicago-New York line, but then the main problems of the steam locomotive surfaced: its extreme demands on the curvature of the track and "slipperiness". And S1 was assigned to the Chicago-Crestline route, where the tracks were "fairly straight." At Crestline, a depot was converted to accommodate the giant and a special large rail triangle was built for maneuvers.
Crestline depot. You can also see the PRR S1.
Promotional video:
PRR S1 was used for towing heavy trains (for example, TRAIL BLAZER, had a mass of one thousand two hundred tons). As the machinists noted, the locomotive was very easy to operate, and on the move it had an incomparable smoothness. The appearance hinted at high speed and this is what one of the dispatchers says about it (there was an article about S1 in Popular Mechanics in 1941): although the speedometer scale ended at one hundred and ten miles / h, according to the measurements of passing checkpoints, the train sometimes moved at a speed of one hundred and thirty-four miles / h! At the same time, as part of S1, he dragged twelve large Pullman cars.
S1 on dead-end tracks just before melting.
The beautiful decorative "apron", giving a futuristic look, was dismantled in 1944 - it only created inconvenience and interfered with maintenance. On the whole, the S1 turned out to be quite "delicate" and expensive to operate. After working for seven years, and having stood for three years on the tracks, in 1949 the only copy of the unique steam locomotive was decommissioned and sent for melting.
