Steam

8 Responses to Steam

1. Grog says:

   March 10, 2016 at 00:00

   That’s a good looking engine. The only ones better than the NW in the picture are the Great Northern R-1 and R-2, for tractive effort and appearance, but there aren’t any left that I know of. The UP Big Boy is still operational.
   • Ronbo says:

     March 10, 2016 at 03:40

     My dad was a minor official in the C&O railroad headquartered in Huntington, West Virginia in the 1950s when I was a kid – and the old steamers were still pulling freight and people – but being rapidly replaced by the diesels.

     Those were the days, heh!
     • MvL says:

       March 11, 2016 at 16:21

       Those certainly were the days Ronbo.
       Sadly….
       All the Good Times are Over .
       Norman Blake, flatpicker sums it up pretty nicely.
2. Ronbo says:

   March 10, 2016 at 03:53

   Remus said,

   PJ Media, Richard Fernandez – The establishment, unlike the voters, is risk-averse. They are too used to gambling with other people’s money to go for broke. They are more likely to offer the appearance of reform rather than its painful reality and hope smoke and mirrors suffice to halt the blaze. Their goal is no longer to “build a world without nuclear weapons” or establish a “rule based international order” nor even “Hope and Change”. Its goals like those of the refugees become far more basic. All Washington wants to do now is survive.

   —————————————————

   Thank you, Donald Trump:

   http://ronbosoldier.blogspot.com/2016/03/now-we-know-identity-of-most-dangerous.html

   They are wise to be concerned with survival.
3. Grog says:

   March 11, 2016 at 08:32

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W65eOOK9eZU
   • Ronbo says:

     March 11, 2016 at 11:46

     Excellent video! These days we often forget “Our fathers’ magic carpet made of steel” and the impact railroads had on everyday life the early 1940s.
4. Bo Chandler says:

   March 11, 2016 at 12:31

   I’ve always liked this picture.

   http://www.steamlocomotive.com/bigboy/4019b.jpg

   You really need to see a man standing next to the damn thing to get an understanding of how large it truly is.
   My primitive calculations on the models preceding it seem to indicate that the engineers seem to have stuck with a cap of no more than 5 metric tonnes per foot of wheel base. I initially figured the larger engine would be considerably harder on the tracks, but apparently I was wrong.
5. Ronbo says:

   March 11, 2016 at 13:41

   As I said before, I grew up in Huntington, W.Va., which was founded and named by Collis P. Huntington, a 19th century railroad CEO and pioneer in 1870.

   Excellent article here on Huntington:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collis_Potter_Huntington

   Yes, I remember as boy seeing those large steam engines, as the primary job of the C&O railroad in those days was to get the coal from the mining districts in West Virginia to the factories in the north, and to do this they needed the large locomotive like the one in the picture to deal with the mountains.