10/1/1956 Richmond Indiana PRR 6468 Eastbound on the Pittsburgh-St Louis Main Line While waiting for the day passenger train for a return inspection trip back to his home base in Anderson, IN, my father, who was track supervisor on the PRR's Richmond Branch snapped this slide of a Pennsy Class J-1 behemoth. The J-1 class was Juniata built, but copied from a C&O design. It lacks the belpaire firebox / boiler commonly found on other PRR steam locomotives, and sports a keystone smokebox number plate instead of the round number plates found on most other classes of PRR freight locomotives. According to Dad, the J-1 was a water hog; even with that big tender, it had to be watered frequently. Dad also said the J-1 class tended to stay on PRR Lines West in the twilight years of Pennsy steam. All Pennsy J-1's were scrapped; none survive. Photo by Maynard Krug - Bob Krug Collection
Yeah, thanks. Taken the day before my fourth birthday. Steam in color! I always check out your pictures and am never disappointed. Doug
I did not know that PRR had any mainline locos without BelPaire fireboxes. Nice photo, Roger. Living back there in the time that I did, as a kid, I never saw a PRR steamer of any class. We did not get far away from home back then. Would like to have witnessed one of those!
They wouldn't have, but they needed more power during WWII. These C&O Texas types were famously good machines. Until the advent of the Santa Fe's Texas types with a bit more boiler pressure, these engines produced the largest piston thrust ever recorded. The government wasn't about to allow 500,000 pounds of much-needed steel to be gambled on an engine that might not work well, so it was decreed that only locomotives of 'proven design' could be produced during the war. The PRR had not come up with a superpower freight engine of its own that they liked, so they picked a design they did like and had that copied. And that's how a C & O design came to wear the keystone! In 1956, the PRR leased some of the Santa Fe's wartime 2-10-4 types, and the two worked side by side in Ohio for a summer. Reportedly, these could start a heavier train, but the Santa Fe's could pull a given train faster. So, presumably these could at least equal the 95,000 pounds of tractive effort the C&O job was rated at, but couldn't quite match the Santa Fe engines' measured 5600 drawbar horsepower.
