C&O Built 60. Fifty-Eight Went To The Torch. The Two Left Have Sat Cold For Seventy Years.

C&O Built 60. Fifty-Eight Went To The Torch. The Two Left Have Sat Cold For Seventy Years. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway ordered the H-8 Allegheny from Lima Locomotive Works in 1941 to move coal over one mountain grade in West Virginia. Sixty were built between December 1941 and December 1948, road numbers 1600 to 1659. On a C&O and Lima dynamometer car, one of them recorded 7,498 drawbar horsepower — the highest figure ever measured on a steam locomotive, and roughly 1,200 more than Union Pacific claimed for the Big Boy. That record was bought with weight. The contract specified an engine of about 724,500 pounds. The locomotives came out at 771,300 pounds on the drawings and as high as 778,200 by one Lima engineer's figure — roughly 52,000 pounds over. The overrun came from design changes made during construction, including four successive redesigns of the connecting rods, driven substantially by the C&O's own Advisory Mechanical Committee. Lima paid the Chesapeake and Ohio a three million dollar penalty for missing the target. The same mass produced the highest axle load ever put on rails: 86,700 pounds maximum, 84,650 average across twelve axles. On June 9, 1953, at about 5:25 in the afternoon, locomotive 1642 was working east out of Hinton, West Virginia with 123 loaded cars and 10,430 adjusted tons when its crown sheet overheated from low water. The Interstate Commerce Commission investigated in Report No. 3520 and found the water had been approximately 7-1/4 inches below the highest part of the crown sheet. The boiler's front end struck the rails 440 feet ahead of the explosion; the back head came down 639 feet ahead. The cab was blown 133 feet to the rear and 58 feet to the right, landing at the water's edge of the New River. The engineer, the fireman and the head brakeman were all killed. Every instrument in the cab tested as working. The class was retired between 1952 and 1956, the oldest units barely ten years old. Numbers 1600, 1602, 1603 and 1605 through 1659 were scrapped — 58 locomotives. Two survive: 1601 at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, which took three attempts to get through the door in 1956, and 1604 at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore since 1989. The eight near-identical Virginian Railway AG class locomotives, numbers 900 to 907, were all gone by 1960. This video works through the weight, the penalty, the record, the axle load and the Hinton explosion as one connected engineering story — and ends on what the federal accident record chose to preserve, and what it did not. Chapters: 00:00 Seven And A Quarter Inches 04:26 Sixty Engines For One Mountain 07:33 Fifty-Two Thousand Pounds Over 13:38 The Three Million Dollar Check 20:13 Fifteen Miles An Hour 23:13 Extra 1642 East 26:51 Report Number 3520 30:58 Fifty-Eight To The Torch 35:20 What The Record Keeps References: Chesapeake and Ohio class H-8. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesape... 2-6-6-6 Allegheny Steam Locomotives in the USA. SteamLocomotive.com Locobase. https://www.steamlocomotive.com/locob... Big Boy versus Allegheny. Trains Magazine. https://www.trains.com/trn/railroads/... 2-6-6-6 Allegheny Locomotives: Length, Horsepower, Specs. American-Rails.com. https://www.american-rails.com/2-6-6-... Allegheny Locomotive Research. The Henry Ford. https://www.thehenryford.org/collecti... ICC Accident Investigation Report No. 3520, C&O, Hinton W.Va., June 9 1953. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/44... Chesapeake and Ohio 1642. EverybodyWiki. https://en.everybodywiki.com/Chesapea... Chesapeake & Ohio No. 1642. Locomotive Wiki. https://locomotive.fandom.com/wiki/Ch... Crane Lifting Derailed C&O Cars After Engine 1642 Explosion, Hinton W.Va. West Virginia History OnView, WVU Libraries. https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/0...