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Chesapeake and Ohio Early Diesels by Thomas Dixon Jr Soft Cover 1988 64 Pages
Chesapeake and Ohio Early Diesels by Thomas Dixon Jr Soft Cover 1988 64 Pages
INTRODUCTION
In the public mind (or at least those who still follow our railroads) and certainly to the railfan community, the name Chesapeake & Ohio conjures images of superbly powerful steam locomotives hauling seemingly endless coal trains through the rugged terrain of the Appalachin region. Or perhaps it's the image of the solid, standard George Washington from the great days of heavyweight cars and tavern diners of the 1930's and 1940's that is most often called to mind. Whichever of these images the C&O evokes, one does not often think of it as having particularly interesting or innovative diesel locomotives. Neither does one think of the C&O's role in the dieselization of American railroading that occurred forty years ago.
Because the C&O came late to dieselization, its locomotives tended to be proven, off-the-shelf models, mostly built by the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors (EMD). It missed entirely the somewhat romantic period of innovation in diesels that one associates with the Burlington, Santa Fe, or Union Pacific. Its mechanical department, by and large, opted for the products of a single proven builder, with only a small number of locomotives coming from other makers; these were primarily for switching or other special purposes. Only with the coming of the "second generation" of standard diesels did the C&O make any large purchases when it made repeated orders for the General Electric U- and later B-line of locomotives.
This book focuses on the first decade of diesel operations on the C&O, beginning in 1949 and ending in the early 1960's, when the first of the second-generation diesels began to appear on the railway. This was a decade of great change on the C&O, as steam was quickly supplanted and a whole new set of operational philosophies was established. It was also an era of great prosperity for the C&O as its high-quality metallurgical coal found new markets in the post-World War II industrial boom in the United States and in the revitalized industrial capacity of Europe and Japan. Both domestically-consumed and exported coal experienced unprecedented increases in production, though the use of coal for steam generation, home heat, and business suffered a decline because of the competition of oil.
The C&O did not rely heavily on passenger business as did many of the northeastern and midwestern lines. Neither did it depend on less-than-carload freight for any large part of its revenues. So when the bottom fell out of the passenger business and trucks took the Id market, the C&O still had its great coal-based income. That allowed it not only to weather the economic storm caused by this shift in transportation patterns, but gave it enough surplus money to begin a merger process that eventually led to today's CSX conelomerate.
Before we look at this period of change in the prosperous 1950's, we should give a brief synopsis of C&O history for the general reader.
The C&O's earliest predecessor was the Louisa Railroad, which was incorporated in 1836 to build a line to carry the farm products of Louisa County, to the northwest of Richmond, to market. By 1850, the Louisa had expanded beyond its initial territory and was building towards a great westward expansion. In keeping with these expanded ambitions it changed its name to the Virginia Central. By 1860 it stretched from Richmond to the foot of the Alleghanies, aiming to replace the projected James River & Kanawha Canal in fulfilling the old Virginia dream of the "Great Connection" between the navigation on the James River and that on the "Western Waters" of the Ohio and Mississippi River systems.
However, the Civil War intervened to stop work. In 1868 railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington took control of the company and reorganized it as the C&O, beginning anew the westward expansion. In 1873 the line was completed to the Ohio River at a new city named Huntington in honor of the great man. There the line stayed until 1888 when it was extended down the Kentucky side of the Ohio River to Cincinnati. The decade of the 1890's saw great expansion of branch lines to tap the rich coal and lumber lands of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky as the C&O came under the control of the J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt interests. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the C&O pass under the Pennsylvania Railroad's control, further expanding branches and increasing business. By 1911 the C&O had a line to Chicago and had bought control of the Hocking Valley Railway, linking Columbus and southeastern Ohio with Toledo and Great Lakes commerce. This gave the C&O access to the Lakes over friendly lines and the Hocking Valley. From Toledo coal was shipped to the burgeoning industrial Midwest. In 1917 the C&O tired of relying on other lines to get its coal to the Lakes and began construction of a new main line from near Russell, Kentucky to Columbus. This was finally completed in 1926. The Hocking Valley was formally absorbed by the C&O in 1930.
By 1930 the greatest expansion era was over for the C&O. All its coal branches were complete and producing prodigious amounts. Its main lines were among the most solidly built, best engineered, and best maintained in America and its treasury was full. Because of this and the continued strong market for coal, the C&O not only survived the Great Depression unscathed by financial embarrassment, but actually improved its physical plant and took advantage of cheap labor, available materials, and slack traffic to upgrade main lines, enlarge or bore new tunnels, improve grades, and replace bridges. This work positioned it well for the great effort of World War II.
After a superlative performance during the War, the C&O was in a very good position to handle the postwar economic boom.
The C&O's motive power policy up to 1910 had followed standard railroad practices. But beginning in that year the C&O became an innovator in steam locomotive technology, opting for heavier and more powerful engines to pull its heavy coal trains over the Virginias' Alleghany Mountain and across the flatlands of Ohio. By 1930 it was firmly in the "Super Power" camp of Lima Locomotive Works. From then until the arrival of diesels, the C&O was looked up to as one of the innovators in the steam arena. Beginning in the 1930's the diesel builders brought the diesel-electric locomotive from experimental to production status. The War served to accelerate this process, which became very rapid in the immediate postwar years. But of all the railroads embracing the new technology, the C&O was the one that steadfastly refused to buy diesels for any purpose. The philosophy of its management was that since coal was the C&O's principal commodity, it should do everything possible to promote it. This included using coal as the fuel for the railroad.
Although C&O management was solidly anti-oil and anti-diesel, they nontheless realized that the reciprocating steam locomotive as it had been known over the last century was doomed as the principal motive power for American railroads. The C&O began an aggressive campaign to develop alternatives to reciprocating steam that would still use coal. One project was the Steam-Turbine-Electric locomotive and another was a coal-gas-turbine engine. The Steam-Turbine-Electric was actually built by the C&O, American Locomotive Company, and General Electric. This giant locomotive was intended to power a flashy, new high-technology passenger train called The Chessie. The train was also tied to the C&O's campaign to save passenger service through updated equipment, fast schedules, and outstanding service. Both the turbine and The Chessie were part of C&O Chairman Robert Young's crusade to bring railroading up to date and eliminate the railroad's reliance on 19th-century technology and the equally-antiquated thinking of railroad managements. He made a great stir in the decade after World War II, using the rock-solid C&O as his platform. Young ultimately used C&O money to buy him the New York Central's chairmanship. Once he had that job, he was forced to quit his C&O position and the C&O reverted to a less strident posture. But it nevertheless remained firmly in the camp of progressive railroads with an innovative management, a research department that served as a "think tank" for technological innovations, and a solid financial basis for the future.
The Steam-Turbine-Electric failed in service and were retired within a year of their arrival. The C&O experienced a great financial crisis in 1949 as a result of the convergence of several circumstances. First, it had largely rebuilt the Mountain Subdivision over the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah ranges between Charlottesville and Clifton Forge, Virginia. This line hadn't been upgraded since its construction in the 1850's. In addition, major realignments, new tunnels, grade reductions, bridge reconstructions, and other improvements were made in the 1944-1949 period that required the outlay of tremendous sums. Second, during this time the passenger business had suddenly become a losing proposition. Finally, a major coal mine strike in 1949 resulted in the mines working only 170 days that year, thus drastically restricting C&O's cash flow by throttling its principal commodity. During these years C&O had also invested heavily in new rolling stock and motive power. All this left the railway financially embarrassed for the first time in the present century, forcing some decisions that Young really didn't want to make. The financial analysts that Young had hired to steer the C&O into the gleaming future he envisioned finally found an audience for their conclusion that dieselization made sense.
So it was that in 1949 C&O management caved in on the diesel question and the first batch of switchers was purchased for the old C&O lines. C&O President Walter Touhy announced in a news release in May, 1949, "It appears to us that there are very substantial savings in the use of diesels for switching purposes only." In that year, 142 diesels were ordered for both the old C&O lines (now called the Chesapeake District) and the former Pere Marquette lines (now called the PM District or Northern Region). All of these were switchers except for a few road diesels for the PM lines.
The old Pere Marquette lines in Michigan and Canada had already been C&O's proving ground for diesels. The PM had been formed in 1899 out of a maze of smaller Michigan roads that had crystallized into three major systems by then. The PM, growing prosperous with the developing automotive industry in Michigan, came under C&O influence in the 1920's as part of the great railroad empire assembled by O.P. and M.J. Van Sweringen of Cleveland. The brothers put together a system based first on the Nickel Plate and later the C&O. The PM remained independent, but wholly owned by the C&O, until 1947, when it was merged into the main system. In 1939 the PM had bought its first diesel, followed by another in 1942 and several more in the 1942-1945 period. Logically, they were products of General Motor's Electro-Motive Division since GM was one of the railroad's biggest shippers. These SW1's and NW2's were used to dieselize several important switching areas and were quite well received.
In 1946 the Pere Marquette inaugurated the country's first postwar streamliners, the Pere Marquettes. These were seven-car lightweight coach trains running between Detroit and Grand Rapids on expedited schedules and were to prove Young's theory that good passenger trains could beat automobile, bus, and airline competition. They were powered by two EMD E7-model passenger diesels. Six more E7's came to the PM in 1947, and a final two units in 1948 (after the C&O merger) dieselized all of the Pere Marquette's passenger service. In 1948, also, more switchers just about eliminated steam switching from the railway. Thus in 1949 the C&O planners had several years of both switching and road diesel performance statistics to look at. Yet the C&O's philosophy was still firmly committed to coal-burning locomotives as the only proper motive power for coal-hauling trains. Even while the PM lines were being given diesels, C&O management ordered 105 new steam locomotives for the old C&O lines! It was certainly a house divided in its localities and basic philosophies. This last great lot of steam consisted of 15 of the C&O's giant 2-6-6-6 simple articulated "Allegheny" types, 40 of its workhorse 2-8-4's (called "Kanawha" types on the C&O) for freight work, five of the 4-8-4's and five of the 4-6-4's for passengers, 30 of the 0-8-0's for the yards, and ten plodding 2-6-6-2 compounds for coal mine shifter runs. The 0-8-0's were hardly a year old when the decision to dieselize yard work was made, and many were sold to the all-steam Virginian and Norfolk & Western.
The 1949 diesel order for the C&O lines saw the arrival of 20 EMD NW2's and 58 S-2 switchers from Alco. There were also three sets of EMD TR3 hump engines, which were essentially an NW2 semi-permanently joined to two cabless boosters, all for yard work. Then, in 1950, the idea of using diesels in road freight service finally gained a foothold and the Chicago Division was completely dieselized with the purchase of 16 three-unit A-B-A EMD F7 road freight haulers. This was a logical line on which to test the road diesels since it was a fairly flat line across Indiana, far removed from the pressures of coal operator customers. It was a line haul operation with few switching districts and no branches. It had bridge and clearance restrictions that precluded the use of modern steam power; standard steam power on the line had been 2-8-2 Mikados built in 1923-24. It also was not very visible, since the last passenger trains-mere locals-had been removed in 1949.
With the success of the F7's on the Chicago Division well established, the C&O's motive power men ordered 27 more sets of A-B-A units in late 1951 for delivery in the spring of 1952. These units were used system-wide and completely dieselized road freight work on the Ohio lines. A final four sets in late 1952 rounded out the 141 F7's that the C&O owned.
To supplement the passenger fleet and make locomotives available to handle troop trains and specials as well as some secondary runs, the C&O bought seven sets of A-B-A FP7's in early 1952 and an additional two sets in 1953 for a total of 24 of these units. They were used on passenger runs when needed, and when not were most often seen on manifest freight where their high gear ratio could be put to best advantage. With the arrival of these units, the C&O fleet of cabs was complete at 165. But it was the end of the cab unit era in American railroading and the road switcher was ascendant.
From May of 1952 to April of 1954, the Chesapeake District received 101 GP7's that had proved so successful in completely killing steam on the Pere Marquette District. Twenty-six Alco RSD-5 road units arrived in May and June of 1952 for use on coal drags between Russell and Toledo and later in hump yard service. The GP9 model from EMD was purchased beginning in December of 1954 and by August of 1957 numbered 363 units on the Chesapeake District. Finally 22 Alco RSD-12 and RSD-7 heavy road freight engines arrived in 1956 and were concentrated in the Logan, West Virginia coalfields, replacing the 2-6-6-2 compound Mallets on mine runs and on the mainline from Logan to Russell.
Steam's last stand came in 1955-56 when an upturn in export coal business as well as a boom in domestic production (thus spurring the metallurgical coal business and merchandise and automobile traffic) caught the C&O short of power. So much steam had been retired during the Korean War that diesel orders couldn't catch up fast enough. Thus the C&O reactivated the newest of its steamers, which were still stored and could be brought back to life with the least work. So in 1955 and 1956 steam locomotives that had been retired for as much as two to three years were back on the road thumbing their noses at the diesels. But not for long. The reactivated steamers were used mainly on the Hinton Division between Hinton and Handley, West Virginia and in the Logan coal district where the 2-6-6-2 Mallets had never given up. The final chapter of steam closed with the arrival of the last orders of GP9's and RSD-12's and -7's in 1956. The last steamer to run was an old H-6 2-6-6-2 out of Peach Creek Yard in Logan in October of 1956. After that the only steam operations on the C&O were for excursions.
Meanwhile back on the PM District the C&O had purchased 14 of EMD's BL2 model locomotives. These strange and rare engines were a transition model between EMD's road freight units and the road switcher and were built only in limited numbers. The 14 units that C&O bought in 1948 and 1949 constituted 24% of the entire fleet that EMD built. They were all lettered C&O but had a distinctive PM paint scheme settled on before the merger. In 1950, 20 of EMD's GP7-model road switchers arrived on the PM District, followed the next year by 98 more, thus eliminating steam from the Michigan and Canada lines by mid-1951.
On the Chesapeake District between 1950 and 1952, 42 Baldwin heavy road switchers of the AS-616 model were installed for transfer, hump, and heavy switching service. They were used mainly at Columbus, Russell, Kentucky (where the C&O had the largest yard owned by a single road), and Huntington, West Virginia, and on the steep grade from Cincinnati west to Cheviot, Ohio on the Chicago Division.
Probably the most visible and symbolic move was made in May of 1951 when 27 EMD E8 passenger units arrived and dieselized most of the C&O's passenger service almost overnight, banishing the world's heaviest Hudsons and the famed "Greenbrier" 4-8-4 types to freight service and sending Pacifies and smaller passenger steamers to the scrapper. In May of 1953, four additional E8's rounded out the C&O fleet of this model.
The original publicity releases on the purchase of diesels said that the C&O was buying these units because analysis showed that they could pay for themselves in overall economies in four to five years. By that time the C&O expected the gas or coal turbine locomotive to be ready for production. The argument went that when this occurred, the diesels would be sold and the C&O would revert to coal as a fuel, using the new technology that was then being actively pursued by a consortium of railroads and one of the steam locomotive builders. Of course time would prove that the economies of the diesels made them so popular that the difficult research to perfect a coal-powered engine languished and eventually collapsed. By the early 1950's it was obvious that the fate of the reciprocating steam locomotive on the C&O was sealed. The cheap price of fuel oil, the economies gained by less shop time and easier roadbed maintenance offset their initial high per-unit cost. In particular, the downward thrust of the reciprocating parts of a steam locomotive-known as "dynamic augment" - had made roadway maintenance exacting and expensive, but the smooth torque of the diesels eliminated the need for constant roadbed work. All of these savings became more and more evident in the 1950-54 period as steam was progressively edged out, even though C&O management still maintained that they intended to use steam for the foreseeable future where it proved more economical than diesels.
It's interesting to note that the C&O stuck with one builder for most of its initial diesel orders, but since General Motors was so important a customer it's not surprising either. Alco supplied some C&O engines, but soon faded from the scene. The C&O's favorite builder of modern steam, Lima, never supplied a single diesel to the C&O's fleet.
There were no orders for engines of any type between 1957 and 1962. The Geeps and F's held sway on the mainlines and branches alike, with the F's, of course, usually appearing on manifest freight trains and run-throughs while the Geeps showed up in almost any duty as befitted their general-purpose name. The heavy coal trains over Alleghany Mountain from Hinton to Clifton Forge, that had required a 2-6-6-6 Allegheny type in front and back, now rolled over the 0.57-percent, 14-mile grade with four or five Geeps up front. At first the railway used two or three in front with two helping, the helpers cutting off at Alleghany, Virginia and returning to Hinton. But soon it was decided to use all the power up front. Pushers on this grade weren't revived until the 1980's. The E8's handled passengers easily as trains were eliminated over the years and the fleet remained largely intact until they began to be transferred to the B&O after the C&O/B&O affiliation in 1963. The B&O had more passenger service than the C&O and its locomotives were older and wearing out.
The first of what has become known as the "second generation" of diesels were ordered in 1962 and delivered in 1963, just a little over a decade after the arrival of the first road engines and only seven years after the disappearance of steam. The first class of diesels to leave the C&O was the EMD BL2's. These 14 engines were traded in to EMD in the summer of 1962 for GP3O's to be delivered that fall.
In the 1962-through-1965 period the C&O got 48 GP3O's, 19 SD18's, 38 U-25B's, 36 GP35's, and 12 SD35's. All these models were from favorite EMD except the U-25B's, which were from General Electric. From that time forward the C&O began splitting its orders between EMD and GE as the second-generation fleet expanded. The SD18's and the U-25B's were first used on the old mainline across Alleghany Mountain, but eventually were reassigned, the SD18's to switching and hump yard duties at Russell and Handley, and the U-25B's to the Michigan lines. In the 1960's and 1970's, the second-generation fleet expanded and replaced the first-generation diesels much in the way the latter had replaced steam, as massive orders of GP38, GP39, GP40, GP40-2, SD40, U-23B, U-30C, and GE's B-series units arrived. Alco's only entry in the second-generation competition was a set of C-630's bought in 1967 and sold in 1974. The first-generation units soon began to be transferred to the B&O after that road was taken over by the C&O, since it was in need of power. The entire fleet of C&O F-units went to the B&O in 1963 and 1964, where they fit right in with the huge fleet of F's that the B&O had. Having dieselized much earlier than the C&O, the B&O had been in on the heyday of the cab unit that the C&O missed. The Alco and Baldwin switchers and road engines also found their way to the B&O in the mid-1960's and worked there for about a decade before scrapping. The Geep fleet was eventually sold, scrapped, or downgraded to yard work to replace switchers that were largely eliminated in the 1970's and early 1980's. By the early 1980's it was hard to find a Geep on a mainline train.
The E7's were transferred to the B&O in the mid-1960's and many of the E8's went there in the late 1960's as well, before scrapping. The last E-units were off the C&O a year or two after Amtrak's takeover of passenger service in 1971, since the new company didn't buy any C&O units. Of the first generation, few survive. The C&O Museum now holds a Pere Marquette SW1 that dates from 1942, and it's still running, carrying museum visitors on a short ride around Baltimore. In the 1970's, C&O, B&O, and Western Maryland power under Chessie System was totally consolidated and intermixed. Beginning in about 1985, Chessie and Seaboard System power began to be totally integrated and in 1986 a new CSX paint scheme was devised, thus beginning the cycle again of erasing the last vestiges of the old order and installing a new era.
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