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Chesapeake & Ohio Allegheny 2-6-6-6 Locomotive a Retrospective By Parker & Dixon
Chesapeake & Ohio Allegheny 2-6-6-6 Locomotive a Retrospective By Karen Parker & Thomas W. Dixon, Jr.
Hard Cover
128 pages
Copyright 2015
Contents
Introduction
1. The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway
2. C&O Freight Locomotives
3. H-8 Concept and Design
4. Building the H-8
5. Testing and Performance
6. The Great Weight Debate
7. What They Did and Where They Did It
8. Tales Old Railroaders Tell
9. Photo Section: H-8s at Work Across the C&O,
10. The Virginian 2-6-6-6s
11. The H-8 in Advertising
Appendices:
C&O's Dynamometer Car
Diagram Sheets
Bibliography
Introduction
At this writing it has been about a dozen years since any extensive treatment of the C&O's H-8 class 2-6-6-6 Allegheny-type locomotive was in print. Material on the locomotive has been available, but only as chapters in other books or articles. Since the Allegheny is the iconic C&O steam locomotive, eclipsing all others in its popularity among railfans, historians, and modelers, the C&O Historical Society (C&OHS) is publishing this book.
In writing this book, we have drawn on a number of previously published sources, most researched and written by Gene Huddleston, chief among them The Allegheny, Lima's Finest, by Gene Huddleston and T. W. Dixon, Jr., published by Hundman Publishing in several editions. Others are listed in the bibliography that appears at the end of this book. We didn't stop with these sources, however. The availability of a previously unpublished set of Lima construction photos allowed us to included an expanded construction section. We also have drawn heavily on the C&O's reports on testing the H-8s with dynamometer car
DM-1 to provide more performance data and new explanations of that data. We have also endeavored to find and include as many unfamiliar photos as we could, ensuring that this new work is as fresh as we can make it. We have, of course, included a number of familiar photos as well, either because of their overall excellence or because they are essential to telling the story of these magnificent locomotives.
Material on the H-8s appears with some frequency in Chesapeake & Ohio History, the official magazine of the C&O Historical Society. Membership in the Society is available on application (see page 2 for details).
In order to understand how the Allegheny-type fits into C&O history and progression, some background about the railway itself is necessary to set the stage.
The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway began in central Virginia as the Louisa Railroad in1837, steadily expanded to Richmond in the east and to the base of the Alleghany* Mountains in the west, renaming itself Virginia Central in 1850. It was an important strategic and tactical support to the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was renamed Chesapeake & Ohio after the war and expanded westward to the Ohio River in 1873 under the leadership of Collis P. Huntington, who had just completed the transcontinental railroad as part of the "Big Four" of the Central Pacific. Connections were made by steamboat to Cincinnati, but a rail connection was soon available through Kentucky courtesy of Huntington's other railroads in the area. After a bankruptcy reorganization in 1878, the C&O steadily expanded over the next half century. It completed its own line to Cincinnati in 1889. In that year it also started a premier passenger service with through cars to New York via the Pennsylvania Railroad in the east and the Big Four (NYC) to Chicago and St. Louis in the west, a service lasting into the 1960s.
The line traversed territory underlain with high quality bituminous coal that began to be mined and shipped via the C&O. This product would dominate the C&O's operations for its entire life, and by the late 1940s it had become known as the "Coal Bin or America." Starting in the early 1880s and ending at about the time of World War I, C&O built over 100 branch lines to tap coal in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. In 1881 it built a line down the Virginia Peninsula to Newport News, opposite Norfolk on the great Hampton Roads estuary. Coal was shipped east to this point. This coal was sent via coastwise shipping to the northeastern United States, used for steamship bunker coal, and ultimately exported around the world. C&O's coals were ideal metallurgical and steam fuels, and early gained a high reputation for quality.
In 1889 the C&O left C.P. Huntington's financial control and entered that of the Morgans and Vanderbilts. After 1900 it was part of the hardly remembered Hawley railroad network, and then controlled briefly by the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1923 it came into the orbit of the Van Swer-ingen financiers in Cleveland, who combined it with the Nickel Plate Road (New York, Chicago & St. Louis), the Erie, the Hocking Valley of Ohio and the Pere Marquette of Michigan. The C&O was by far the wealthiest of these lines and served as the linchpin for the Van Sweringen interests.
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