On this day in 1948, the Norfolk & Western Railway's first Y6b locomotive, #2171, departed the Roanoke Shops for road service.
The 2-8-8-2 Y6b was a monster locomotive, weighing in at about 582,900 pounds; adding the (presumably full of coal and water) tender1 took the figure to 961,500 pounds. With a weight like that, one doesn't casually go hopping from somewhere in Connecticut to Penn Station in the city of New York for the morning commute.
Instead, these locomotives were used for low-to-moderate speed service pushing or pulling long drags of coal cars headed to Norfolk from out of Southwest Virginia and West Virginia, our rogue province. Coal traffic had the advantage of being distinctly non-perishable, so timekeeping wasn't so much of a virtue. More important was the ability to carry a lot of coal at a steady pace, and the design of the Y6b reflected that.
The Y6b can easily be mentioned in the same breath as the Allegheny 2-6-6-6 type used by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway and the Virginian Railway, and the Big Boy 4-8-8-4 used by the Union Pacific Railroad. All three types constitute essentially the giants of American steam motive power, huge coal-fired monsters that shook rails and the ground around them every time they passed.
Y6a #2156 survives today at the National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, Missouri, but no other Y series survived the scrapper's torch. Kim Thurlow suggests that the last surviving Y6b locomotives met the torch in a Roanoke, Virginia scrapyard in 1976. Wouldn't surprise me.
1 My source indicates that the standard Y6b tender carried 22,000 gallons of water, along with thirty tons of coal.
Posted by Country Pundit at April 12, 2004 05:37 PM