16 CLASSIC TRAINS FALL 2019B
y 1944, America remained
in the dark shadow of
World War II. But a little
light was starting to make
its way through. The tide
was turning in the Allies’
favor as, one after another,
victories began showing up in newspapers
and movie newsreels. The coming months
would see U.S. troops on a steady march
across the Japanese-held islands of the Pa-
cific, culminating in the August 1 capture
of Tinian, ultimately the base of the most
important B-29 squadron of the war. In
Europe, the German army was in a steady
retreat from the east, losing Crimea to the
Red Army on May 12. On June 6 came
the epochal invasion of Western Europe
at Normandy, France — D-Day — and by
August 25 Paris would be liberated.
Millions of Allied soldiers, sailors, and
airmen shouldered the heaviest burden, of
course, but none of their triumphs would
have been possible without heroics on the
home front. Never before had a nation and
an economy so quickly transformed itself,as American factories, farms, mines, and
machine shops converted to a war footing.
The propaganda phrase “arsenal of de-
mocracy” could not have been more apt.
The railroads of the United States —
and Canada, to be sure — were an essen-
tial part of this march to victory. As
Trains Editor David P. Morgan later
would put it, “Railroading’s finest hour
lasted 45 months and produced the finest
testimony of all time for the efficiency of
the flanged wheel on the steel rail.” Along
the way, as Morgan reported, railroads
hauled 90 percent of military supplies
and 97 percent of all troops. The industry
doubled its pre-war ton-mile production
and quadrupled its passenger traffic.
A share of credit for this performance
should go to an illustrious group of steam
locomotives built in 1944. Four years after
EMD’s FT diesel began to make steam’s
fate obvious, steam was enjoying a re-
prieve, and the halls of Baldwin, Alco,
Lima, Altoona, and Roanoke continued to
ring with the sound of locomotive con-
struction. In many ways these machinesepitomized the ultimate in steam, yet at
the same time were born of compromise.
What a class it was! More than 350 en-
gines, most of them top-of-the-line ex-
pressions of everything the builders had
learned since the advent of Super Power
in 1925. Consider just a few from the all-
star lineup: 18 Pennsylvania J1 2-10-4s,
one of the most successful engines in
PRR history; 68 examples of the stellar
2-8-4 conceived by the Van Sweringen
roads’ Advisory Mechanical Committee,
spread across three railroads, Nickel
Plate, Pere Marquette, and Chesapeake &
Ohio; 10 Santa Fe 4-8-4s and 25 2-10-4s,
monarchs of the Southwest; 10 Norfolk &
Western A-class 2-6-6-4s, the engine his-
torian Ed King called the “Mercedes of
steam”; and, arguably at the top of the
heap, 5 Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 Big Boys.
It’s hard to imagine a more accom-
plished group of steam locomotives, yet
the fact they existed at all was as bitter-
sweet as it was fateful. At least 24 groups
were the last engines of their class on a
specific railroad, and 14 closed out newSP received its final new steam,
20 cab-forward 4-8-8-2s, in 1944.
AC-12 No. 4278 climbs Cuesta
Grade with the second section
of Coast Line freight 920 in 1955
or ’56. Homer G. Benton