Train Fans Are Bringing A Legendary 100 MPH Steam Locomotive Back To Life From Scratch

Locomotives and buses are unsung heroes of the transportation world. Day in and day out, these vehicles keep the globe going around. But most of them don’t have happy retirements. Sometimes, every example of what was once an icon is sent to the scrapheap. That was the story of the Pennsylvania Railroad T1 class steam locomotive. Built during the tail end of steam, these locomotives were gorgeous and laid down incredible speed, but not a single example was saved. An international group of railfans refuse to let that stand. The enthusiasts of the T1 Trust are building a brand new T1 from scratch using blueprints, and they just passed the important milestone of getting halfway there.

Few people ever think about the bus they’re riding or the locomotive pulling their commuter train. These vehicles dutifully serve their railroads or transit systems for decades. Then, they’re retired to make way for new equipment. If they’re lucky, these vehicles live a second life with a private owner or educate the public in a place like the Illinois Railway Museum. Yet, despite the historical significance of some vehicles, perhaps countless cars, planes, trains, and ships have gone extinct because all of them have been destroyed in some manner.

Such was the case with the Pennsylvania Railroad T1. These locomotives were icons bearing Raymond Loewy streamlined design, forward-thinking innovation, and blisteringly quick top speeds touching triple digits. However, railroads are businesses and when diesel power usurped steam, the T1s were relegated to smaller roles and eventually, all 52 examples were scrapped. But, if the T1 Trust has its way in a project that has thus far stretched over a decade, the type will have a 53rd example. If we’re lucky, the T1’s line will be continued around 83 years after the last example was built.

The crazy part is that this isn’t even the first time railfans have achieved something like this, but we’ll get back to that in a moment.

The Quest For Power

The work the T1 Trust has done is incredible. It’s one thing to restore an existing steam locomotive. These fans from all over the globe are building an entire T1 from what’s more or less a pile of materials and blueprints. This will be a real locomotive, too, not a display model. But why? Why would anyone dedicate over a decade of their life to reviving a locomotive class?

This story takes us back to the 1930s. In those days, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) was still using its K4 4-6-2 steam locomotives for general and express service. Until the T1, the K4 was the last production locomotive built by the railroad’s shops. These locomotives were built starting in 1914 and production lasted to 1928. At first, the K4s had no problem performing their jobs. However, as the 1930s rolled on, the Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Magazine writes, the K4s ran up against a bit of an issue.

K4s run on the PRR’s “Blue Ribbon Fleet” express service needed to run double-headed K4s to pull the long trains. Not only was this resource intensive, but required PRR to pay two crews for one train. Railroads were going through an unquenchable thirst for more power in these days and PRR’s competition was ahead of the curve. Notably, the New York Central Railroad had its iconic Hudson class. Across the country, the Union Pacific was working on its own legend, the Big Boy.

PRR wasn’t entirely behind. The railroad was experimenting with electric power including the GG1 electric class and as the Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Magazine reports, the railroad wanted a new steam locomotive with power to match an electric locomotive and capable of pulling those heavy limited-stop trains without needing two locomotives at a time to do it.

A Marvel

According to the book Pennsy Power: Steam And Electric Locomotives Of The Pennsylvania Railroad, 1900-1957 by Alvin F. Staufer, the design of the T1 class wasn’t a making of PRR, but Baldwin Locomotive Works Chief Engineer Ralph P. Johnson. The design of the T1 was a bit of an experiment. The locomotive was designed during the ascension of the diesel-electric locomotive, but steam wasn’t yet ready to give up the fight just yet. Johnson felt that he had the key to a steamer that pulled like a diesel.

His vision called for a rigid frame duplex 4-4-4-4 locomotive. That’s one where the driving force is divided between two pairs of cylinders rigidly mounted to the locomotive’s frame. The 4-4-4-4 notation means a four-wheel leading truck, two independent sets of four driving wheels, and a four-wheel trailing truck. This was considered to be an evolution of the 4-8-4, where driving was handled through a single set of eight driving wheels. The theory was that doubling up on machinery and cylinders meant higher power and efficiency.

To give you an example of all of these numbers, take a look at this Delaware & Hudson scale model locomotive:

It’s a 4-8-4. That’s four wheels on the leading truck, a single set of eight driving wheels, and four wheels on the trailing truck.

Here’s a Big Boy:

This big boss is a 4-8-8-4 with an articulating section.

As the Pennsy Power book notes, these 4-4-4-4s offered several proposed benefits. The rods and reciprocating parts were expected to shave off around 800 pounds while the four small cylinders had a shorter stroke than two large cylinders, resulting in a slower piston speed compared to a 4-8-4. The 4-4-4-4 promise also included greater stability, lower wear and tear, and the smaller cylinders that aided in that higher efficiency. Locomotives with two sets of driving wheels did exist, but they were largely found on locomotives with articulating structures, not the rigid frames that the T1s would have. In other words, this was shaping up to be the dream passenger locomotive PRR was looking for.

The project that would become the T1 began in the late 1930s and as Pennsy Power notes, Johnson had the locomotive in blueprint form for several years before PRR ordered two prototypes of Johnson’s design in 1940. PRR dubbed its new locomotive class as T1 and Baldwin was in charge of building the first two steamers, numbers 6110 and 6111. Both were delivered in 1942 and the locomotives were stunners. Along with the experimental design underneath, these locomotives bore a striking design penned by the famous Raymond Loewy.

PRR wasn’t going into this blindly. In 1939, Baldwin delivered a single experimental S1 class locomotive to PRR. This duplex locomotive was simply a behemoth, but it successfully pulled a 1,350-ton passenger train up to a speed of 100.97 miles per hour. Unfortunately, the wide turning radius of the 6-4-4-6 beast meant that it couldn’t run on most of PRR’s network. The smaller T1 seemed to be a much better fit.

That’s not to say that the T1 was a small locomotive. According to PRR’s specifications, the T1 stretched 123 feet long when you included its tender and weighed 945,000 pounds. For those of you counting, that’s just 10 feet short of a Union Pacific Big Boy. The tender held 19,200 gallons of water and the loaded tender weighed 221 tons all on its own.

The PRR loved what it saw in its two T1s enough that it placed an order for 50 more, half of them being constructed by its own shop. It’s noted that by this time, other railroads were already switching to diesel, but PRR thought steam was still the way.

Official specifications called for 64,653 pounds of tractive effort plus the equivalent of 6,552 HP, and as Trains.com reports, the T1s were intended to run well over 70 mph in sustained operations. The idea was that PRR would have a T1 start a train in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and run it all of the way to Chicago with only one coal stop 385 west of Harrisburg in Ohio. The train would do all of this while staying ahead of schedule. But the T1 was designed to go even faster, sustaining 100 mph speeds while pulling 800 tons of train. Incredibly, Trains.com writes, the T1 was still making 6,000 HP above 55 mph, which meant it performed better at such speeds than a few of the era’s diesels lashed together.

Part of the magic was in the valves, as Trains.com notes:

One of the most significant features of the T1s was the use of poppet valves instead of the normal spool-shaped, sliding valve system. With a spool-shaped valve, steam is always simultaneously being exhausted from and admitted into the cylinders. As the valve slides back and forth, the percentage of motion devoted to admitting steam and exhausting it will change continuously. Such valve actions use considerable horsepower. “The typical Baker or Walschaerts valve gear uses between 200 and 300 hp that the engine is producing just to operate the valves and associated gear,” says Johnson.

For the Pennsy’s 50-locomotive T1 fleet, the railroad insisted on using the Franklin steam distribution system with oscillating cams and poppet valves. Think of a device similar to the valves in an automobile engine. As a cam shaft rotates, either the intake valve or the exhaust valve is opened. Steam is admitted to the cylinder and the valve is closed. The process repeats for the exhaust. A dedicated exhaust valve is opened, allowing steam to escape the cylinder.

The poppet valve, with its on-or-off action, dramatically improves steam-usage efficiency. In the spool valve, steam has not fully expanded by the time the valve moves to begin the exhaust portion of the cycle. With a poppet valve, steam is allowed to expand more fully before the exhaust port opens — a port that is larger than the intake port to accommodate the expanded steam. On the Franklin type-A system intake valves measured 5 inches across. The exhaust valves were 6 inches. Two intake and two exhaust valves were placed on the front and back of each cylinder, equipping the T1s with 32 total valves.

Diesel Kicks The T1 To The Siding

The poppet valves in the T1s came from Franklin Railway Supply and were certified to run at a sustained 100 mph. However, in practice, the T1s had a nasty habit of popping valves. Reportedly, Franklin sent someone on some PRR trains to investigate and found that train crews that were running late were actually pushing their trains to sustained speeds above 120 mph. There’s an urban legend out there that one T1 supposedly hit 140 mph, which would have meant that the T1 was the fastest steam locomotive in the world. This was never confirmed and there’s no real evidence of it, but it appeared that these trains were pretty darn quick.

Trains.com also noted that the T1s had a tendency to slip. If the locomotive’s large number of wheels passed an irregularity in the tracks, they might slip and catch, causing excessive vibration and lurching. This slipping happened at both low and high speeds while the locomotives were under the control of both senior and junior crews. One potential cause might have been the locomotive’s suspension failing to equalize the forces between wheels and the track. However, the slippage has also been blamed on poor crew training in handling this unique locomotive.

The Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Magazine notes that a number of anecdotes and legends have been told about the T1s over the decades. The story of these locomotives have apparently been warped through what’s pretty much a several decade-long game of telephone. Some of those reading those retrospectives might have thought the T1 was the holy grail of locomotives. But maybe not so.

The magazine was quick to note that the T1 was not built for stop-and-go commuter service and it wasn’t built to pull heavy trains up grades without assistance, either. Likewise, the locomotive’s distinctive look was crafted specifically to help it achieve the job it was built for. The T1s only real mission was to pull passenger trains on PRR’s line really quickly. As such, other roads didn’t find much appeal in a locomotive that was built for a specific purpose at a specific railroad.

This is echoed by the Chesapeake & Ohio, which thought it could use T1s to replace its aging 4-8-4s. In testing, the railroad found that the mighty T1s needed all of its reserves to accelerate and climb hills, plus the class wasn’t quick to accelerate to begin with. The Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Magazine even claims the wheel slip issue was overblown. Either way, PRR eventually figured it out.

Unfortunately, the T1s never really got their chance to shine. The locomotives proved to be expensive to run as not only did PRR have to deal with the teething issues, but the maintenance crews had the extra burden of cutting through the distinctive bodywork to enact repairs. The lifespan of the T1s were then cut short in 1948 when PRR President Martin W. Clement announced that the railroad was going diesel. Those diesels replaced the T1s on those express routes, forcing the still young steamers to do other jobs.

In a way, the writing was already on the wall beforehand. While PRR was still ordering T1s it took delivery of EMD E7A diesel-electrics. PRR was also working on a steam turbine locomotive, but that never entered production. T1s eventually found themselves running mail service and express trains that weren’t the Blue Ribbon Fleet. But the T1s were pretty redundant because alongside the new diesel-electric tech, PRR still had the K4s on hand as well. The T1s weren’t great for local service and weren’t designed to effectively pull freight. With no real role within PRR, the T1s were all removed from service by 1952. All of them were scrapped before the end of the decade.

The Continuation

Until now, the T1 has lived on only in memories, blueprints, and photos. PRR wiped these locomotives off of the face of the planet.

Sometimes, enthusiasts take matters into their own hands. That was the case with the 2008 LNER Peppercorn Class A1 60163 Tornado, which was the first steamer built in the UK since 1960. The hardcore railfans of the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust brought the A1 back to life and if you’ve watched Top Gear you’ve certainly seen that beauty before:

In 2014, another group of railfans wanted to replicate the same success here in America. The T1 Trust was formed to bring the T1 class back to life. What’s incredible about these efforts is that these enthusiasts aren’t just building a locomotive that looks like the originals. They’re taking original blueprints and building a continuation locomotive, but with some improvements thanks to decades of progress.

Trains.com notes that the new T1, No. 5550, will run on oil. That’s a notable advancement over its ancestors, which ran on coal. Likewise, the original T1 featured riveted boilers, cast frames, and cast cylinders. The new T1 has all of these features welded and then radiographed to make sure the welds are perfect every time. The belief is that rivets, while visually cool, are inferior to good welds because each rivet is a place that could experience a leak or a failure.

Yet, at the same time, the T1 Trust team isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here. They’re following the original blueprints so closely that they expect their finished locomotive to be within two percent of the original T1’s weight. The center of gravity is expected to be exact and the girthy frame is expected to weigh within a thousand pounds of the original T1.

But that doesn’t mean they’re baking in the same issues, either. The locomotive is going to have a modern brake system, the ability to interface with a diesel, a wheel slip alarm, and the T1 Trust’s locomotive is expected to be the best of the lot, with that wheel slip issue a thing of the past, anyway. The new T1 will also have camshaft-driven rotary valves, making that poppet valve problem another issue of the past.

This all sounds easy when you type it out, but the effort here is beyond description in words. The T1 Trust had to find what little steam talent remains out there. Remember, it’s been several decades since steamers were last relevant outside of museums, so the talent has either retired or sadly passed away.

That hasn’t stopped T1 Trust General Manager Jason Johnson. He spent 41 eight-hour days poring over 450,000 documents in the Pennsylvania State Archives. The work resulted in finding 1,754 T1 blueprints. Amazingly, that’s nearly every blueprint associated with the historic locomotive. There are only 14 pages the T1 Trust is missing. Since launching the T1 Trust, the group has raised $2,840,000 and volunteers have spent 39,740 hours bringing the T1 back to life.

They’ve found a couple of cheat codes along the way. One was finding a PRR tender that was similar in design to the T1’s original tenders. This will be restored and streamlined, costing the group $200,000. That’s a lot of money, but the move will save the group a whopping $3 million and who knows how many volunteer hours from not having to build their own tender.

Still, a lot of the work is long and expensive. The cab, boiler shell, and prow were all welded together in St. Louis and then trucked 1,200 miles to Pennsylvania. The frame, which was cast on the old locomotives, was welded together piece by piece. Remember, these are also volunteers building this. The T1 Trust isn’t doing this to make money, but to do the ultimate form of train preservation.

As of January 5, the T1 Trust has reached an incredible milestone of 52 percent completion. Here’s what the group said:

We have crossed the 50% mark of completion. This is a really big deal. It means we are on the down hill side of completion. With the main frame nearly complete and cylinders starting construction this Spring, things are really coming together. Once the frame is done, we can start bolting items on to it and start erecting of the locomotive (industry term)

We are still on pace for completion in 2030 but will continue to need your help. Please consider donating to the PRR T1 5550 at [Click Here].

Also, we feel comfortable that we will announce location the locomotive will be erected this Spring. So stay tuned! Feel free to guess in the comments. Maybe a T-shirt to the person that guesses correctly first…..

The progress is quicker than you’d think. The Trust was at 39 percent completion in May 2022. In theory, that would mean completion after 2030, but the team is expecting the latter half of the build to be a bit better.

If you’re interested in helping No. 5550 along, click on this link to donate. Or go to the T1 Trust’s website to follow the team’s progress. Also, follow the team’s Facebook page for so many pictures.

Just finishing T1 No. 5550 would be crazy enough, but the T1 Trust doesn’t want to stop there. If the urban legends are correct, the T1 was faster than any other steamer on the planet. The T1 Trust wants to see how true it is. After completion, the new T1 will race down the tracks with the record set by the LNER A4-class No. 4468 Mallard in its sights. That locomotive set a world record speed of 126 mph in 1938.

If the stories are even remotely true, the T1 should blast right past that. But even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t diminished what this group is achieving here. It’s hard enough to revive a project car, forget bringing an entire locomotive back from the dead. I can’t wait to see No. 5550 rule the rails.