steam on their company’s property for
good. With the diesel revving up for war’s
end, ready to finish what it started just a
few years before, many of the Class of ’
wouldn’t see even 10 full years of service.
The fact that many of these engines
were built at all is due to the policies of the
War Production Board (WPB), specifical-
ly its Transportation Equipment Division,
an agency created by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt in January 1942. The WPB’s
mission was relatively simple in concept:
convert as much civilian industry to war
production as possible. Thus Ford Motor
Co. built B-24 Liberator bombers, Bell &
Howell made gun cameras, and appliance
maker Maytag fabricated aircraft exhaust
systems. The board also was charged with
reassigning basic materials such as steel,
aluminum, copper, rubber, and nylon.
Any products not essential to the war ef-
fort were put on hold. Over its three-plus
years, the Board directed the spending for
$183 billion worth of weapons and sup-
plies, including 40 percent of the world’s
output of munitions during the period.
For the nation’s railroads, the WPB’s
key requirement was that locomotive
production be limited to existing designs
and models. Suddenly motive-power de-
partments found themselves dusting off
blueprints from the 1930s. Also burden-
some was the reallocation of certain met-
al alloys, especially nickel-alloy steel,
which before the war the builders used in
boilers to reduce overall weight without
sacrificing strength. Now, they were obli-
gated to go back to heavier carbon steel.
Without war, this last gasp of “steam’s
finest hour” likely would never have hap-
pened. Before Pearl Harbor, the big story
in railroading was the surge of the diesel,
especially Electro-Motive’s revolutionary
FT. Equipped with the soon-to-be-leg-endary 567 prime mover and capable of
churning out 5,400 horsepower in an
A-B-B-A set, the FT demonstrator wowed
almost every chief mechanical officer who
encountered it. “The diesel that did it,” as
Morgan called the FT, was poised to put
the steam locomotive out of business.
But all that would have to wait. On
New Year’s Day 1944, there were still plen-
ty of great steam locomotives to come, in-
cluding some fascinating surprises, despite
the WPB edict to stick with existing de-
signs. The following pages might serve as a
tribute to these war babies — a little pomp
and circumstance for the Class of ’44.Not far from the shop that built her 12 years before, N&W 2-6-6-4 No. 1231 is prepared for a run at Roanoke, Va., in September 1956. Dick Kuelbs
C&O Allegheny 1642, one of 25 2-6-6-6s de-
livered in 1944, rolls coal empties west at
Covington, Va., in October 1951. William P. Price