Alaska Railroad c. 1925

A year ago, I think (give or take a few weeks) I asked about the airplanes that would've been used at that time--I had concluded that the aircraft in question was an Airco DH-4, and independent confirmation here solidified my thoughts. Looking back on it, the depiction of the DH-4 was impressive--indeed, almost perfect. The creators had their facts straight. Which brings me to this: now I want to know what that darn locomotive was.

Locomotives are identified primarily by their wheel arrangements, like this: l-d-t, where l is the number of leading wheels, d is the number of drive wheels, and t is the number of trailing wheels (excluding tenders). For the record, articulated locomotives (with two sets of drive wheels, are hyphenated, like so: l-d1-d2-t --however the Balto locomotive was most certainly not articulated. I just thought you might want to know, because doesn't everybody like trains? Of course they do.

When I first reviewed the scene, my thought was 4-6-0. Or possibly 2-6-0 (or maybe even 6-6-0), but mainly the first.

Looking back on a list of locomotives operated by the Alaska railroad and narrowing out those that it could not be (acquired after or retired before 1925), we have the following models (wheel arrangement : manufacturer):

0-4-2T : Alco-Rogers
0-4-0 : ?
0-4-0 : Alco-Rogers
0-4-0 : Davenport
4-4-0 : Baldwin
4-6-0 : Baldwin
2-6-0 : Alco/Cooke
2-6-0 : Alco/Brooks
2-8-2 : Baldwin

All information courtesy of alaskarails.org (http://www.alaskarails.org)

Now. That's sorted by time. Now we take a closer look at wheel arrangement. The locomotive in Balto had no trailing wheels that I could discern, but it certainly had leading wheels. Therefore the late model 2-8-2 Baldwin can be discarded, as can the Alco-Rogers 0-4-2T (a tank engine anyway), the '?' (very little information on this enigmatic locomotive) 0-4-0 and the Alco-Rogers and Davenport 0-4-0s. I see six driving wheels, so the 4-4-0 goes as well.

This leaves us with a choice of:

4-6-0 : Baldwin
2-6-0 : Alco/Cooke
2-6-0 : Alco/Brooks

Comparatively easy choice, no? One in three? But we don't go by guessing.

Narrowing further we begin to look at the top structure of the locomotive. While the 4-6-0 Baldwin looks promising at first, we can see that the three top structures in the Balto locomotive are stacked in increasing height, whereas the Baldwin 4-6-0 has the bell in the middle. The Alco/Cooke 2-6-0 (it's concievable that the Balto engine was a 2-6-0, I think) has the bell right in front of the cab. That leaves only one, and son-of-a-gun, they match up pretty well:

Alco/Brooks 2-6-0

With the exception of the stack (which could've been modified anyway and in fact--given this picture of locomotive 601--was) these are a fairly close match, down to the piston arrangement on the wheels (distinct from either of the other x-6-0s, too).

So there's my conclusion, as to locomotive type. Unless I'm wrong and it's not a 2-6-0, it's something else. However. Taking a few more minutes to abuse my poor secondhand (thirdhand, likely) VCR and the Balto VHS, I note that in the second scene--the pickup at Nenana--it's very clear that the locomotive has only 8 wheels. In other words? Yes, the 2-6-0.

The question then becomes: Is this accurate?

There were seven Alco/Brooks 2-6-0s operated by the Alaska Railroad, model numbers 601, 605, 606, 610, 614, 618, and 620. Now it gets frustrating. I know the models that could have run from Anchorage to Nome. I know the name of the conductor. I just don't know what locomotive it was. Short of writing the Historical Society, does anybody know any other resources I might be able to use? I've GISed, used every search engine I know of, pored over the Alaska Rails site, and checked my local libraries. Anybody else got any ideas?

I mean, I know this sounds sort of weird, but:

1. I graduate from high school in nine days, and after the AP tests last week I don't really have any more classes, and I'm bored, and
2. It really pleases me to think that so much work went into Balto, you know?

-Baikal

One vague guess I have might be rail records. I am estimating that these might be obscurely available from perhaps the Library of Congress, maybe under "FCC" or something. Such records would have kept list of the moving freight and engines as they progressed across the nation's rails.

~ Jay ~
KSC FL

Eventually. But right now I'm just being a nitpicker :biggrin:

One vague guess I have might be rail records. I am estimating that these might be obscurely available from perhaps the Library of Congress...

Ah! It's possible that I can do one better. The government federalised the Alaska railroad in, like, 1922... which means that I might be able to get records direct from them--starting from when they acquired a Washington-style bureaucracy.

from Fluke on 7:30 am on May 15, 2003
I don't know a lot about American trains, although I used to love the Uk steam trains when I was much younger. If its any help, I have part of the train in this pic on my website...

Ah! Yes, that was what I was looking for... It could, in fact, be a casebreaker. It certainly seems to me, looking at that picture, that the bell is the furthest forward of the elements of the superstructure. If that's true, than the locomotive almost certainly has to be a 2-6-0, manufactured by the American Locomotive Company at their Brooks plant--those were the only ones with such an arrangement, differing even from Alco's locomotives built at Cooke works.

That was the conclusion I had already arrived at. Now, it is interesting to note that the Alaska Rails site has pictures for 6 of the 7 locomotives, lacking only 614. All of those displayed have straight stacks, while the locomotive in both the picture and the movie have tapering, diamond-shaped stacks. So here comes the second break:

601 was modified with such a stack, as in the picture I linked to below. Was it the only one? Perhaps it was a seasonal modification?

Without directly seeing an expanded picture, we can infer some things, and ask some more questions.

First, those stacks weren't arbitrary. They come in two basic types: 'straight' and 'diamond.' What stack a locomotive uses depends on what fuel it's burning. Locomotives burning 'clean' fuels (like oil or high-quality coal) with little solid residuals can afford to use the straight stacks. In comparison, 'dirty' locomotives (burning poor-quality coal or wood) produce ash. In the early days of rail these could accidentally torch fields and hay and other combustibles, so the diamond stack was designed to trap embers.

Unfortunately a side-effect of that type of stack is that it makes the locomotive less powerful, because the fires can't burn as hot without the constant outflow that a straight stack provides.

Now, the fact that the other locomotives I see (I think, in fact, all of them) use straight stacks--in all sorts of situations would lead us to conclude, in the end, that there was no endemic Alaskan shortage of coal or oil for these locomotives to burn. So why the diamond?

Turns out 601 was modified during the early 1920s (I believe--will check the book again tomorrow). One effect of this modification was to change the drive wheel diameters from 46" to 54". It has been suggested to me that this modification would have increased the locomotive's tractive power at the expense of speed. Perhaps in order to maintain the original speed, more fuel was required, hence producing more byproducts and requiring the diamond. Perhaps they took advantage of the opportunity to use a lower-quality (but cheaper) fuel.

Or perhaps it's all coincidence. But I have reason to suspect that the 601 was in service on the North Nenana Limited, and if it stayed on as a passenger liner with the modifications, perhaps it did require greater fuel intake.

I've been given many things to think about. My visit to the library tomorrow should be productive.

-Baikal

* I'm aware that the earlier posts aren't quoted properly. I tried, but it looked... weird. They wouldn't close. So I just gave up. It's that persistent spirit that has gotten me this far and will get me yet farther...

(Edited by Baikal at 8:17 pm on May 15, 2003)

Jay
KSC FL

Now. As to locomotives.

I'm still trying to puzzle this out.

So. While we're learning (I'm researching as I write this), let's talk about coal for awhile.

Not all coal was created equal. Coal is divided into 'ranks,' with 4 primary types (according to Britannica and, hey, I trust them). In order of increasing rank, they are:

Lignite
Sub-bituminous
Bituminous
Anthracite

As we increase in 'rank,' coalification (the level of compression that forms coal) also increases, producing a harder, more pure coal that burns cleaner. Hence lignite-fired locomotives were extremely polluting and set fires, while Phoebe Snow could say, 'my gown stays white from morn till night, upon the Road of Anthracite' (yay Lackawanna)

The Mogul-type locomotives (in this case, 'Panama Moguls' since they first saw service in Panama) in use in Alaska were designed to use bituminous coal. In other words, they should've been comparatively clean-burning, explaining the fact that they all have straight stacks.

All except one, apparently, but we don't know which one it is. Yet. On the other hand we can make some pretty darn good guesses.

In 1920, locomotive 601 was in service on the North Nenana Limited, which although I have very little information on I presume ran in the Tanana valley to the north-east of Nenana. So it was a passenger train, of sorts. A picture from the Alaska Rails site puts 601 in Nenana, so we can assume that it was a comparatively frequent visitor.

So we can place at least one locomotive in Nenana during the early to mid 1920s.

At this point the central issue is this: apparently a locomotive was refitted by the Alaska Railroad to operate with a diamond stack it shouldn't have needed. Why?

Now. It appears that I made a mistake yesterday. I didn't have my reference handy, and I assumed from an Internet site that the diameter of the wheels for locomotive 601 was increased. Turns out that this isn't the case. They were actually decreased, from 63" to 54". So this would've increased the speed at the cost of tractive power, but given the immense capacity of the Mogul I'm told that this wouldn't have made much of a difference.

The other option is that it was burning something other than bituminous coal. And, I now suspect, it was.

To understand why, first realise that Alaska is a veritable treasure trove of natural resources. Gold, oil, and, of course, coal. Alaskan coal in general, though plentiful, is not of a particularly high quality--it's too new, and hasn't had time to undergo sufficient coalification. Much of the coal comes from the interior. In fact, towns like Nenana and Lignite (both of which lie on the railroad) are both near coal fields producing, it seems, sub-bituminous and lignite coal.

There's our answer! Alaskan coal is cheap, so you switch to it. Only problem is, it's a little lower quality and so you have to change the stacks to keep from setting things alight.

Except for one little thing. Only one Panama Mogul has a diamond-stack. Why? The railroad was completed in 1923, two years before the events in Balto (well, maybe only a year and a half). Nenana was accessible to the public--Nenana/Lignite low-quality coal would've been readily available... so why wasn't it used? All of the locomotives should've been had diamond-shaped stacks!

I think I can answer this, too.

Locomotive 601, operating up north, would've had plentiful access to the cheap lignite coal of it's home. The other locomotives, further away, wouldn't be as close to that coal. Because of the linear ways that railroads operate, they would've been closer to Anchorage.

At first I thought that perhaps that meant that continental coal was imported. In retrospect that's kind of stupid, though, since quality isn't that important when you've got so much coal so much closer. Then I thought, 'I wonder what else is in Alaska.'

The Matanuska Valley lies just north of Anchorage, in the Alaskan interior but readily accessible. Like the Tanana region it, too, is a source of coal. What type, though? You guessed it--bituminous and anthracite, heavy on the latter. Good stuff. So why bother tramping up all the way to Godforsaken places like Nenana when you've got coal--better coal--right next to you? Both fields were being exploited in 1925, so people would've known this.

In other words. The Nenana engine (possibly only one), close to Nenana, uses lignite coal and has to have a new stack. The other locomotives draw from the Matanuska Basin fields and can keep their straight stacks.

Now imagine it's 1925. The most powerful locomotives (the 2-8-2s won't really enter service until 1926) are the M2 Moguls, the 2-6-0s built by Alco at Brooks. They're almost twice as powerful as the older 2-6-0s (Cooke works), for instance, so they lend themselves well to long hauls with heavy cargoes.

But up north, model 601 is employed on a passenger run. It's not a freight locomotive and so doesn't need the power as much. The wheels are shrunk and the locomotive operates with diminished hauling power but nobody really notices anyway, and the train runs faster. Because it's up north, it uses Lignite's lignite coal and doesn't have to carry it from Anchorage; it's also given a new stack.

In January an epidemic seems imminent in the town of Nome. There's no medicine there; it has to be brought from elsewhere. Like Anchorage. As I recall (will check this out Monday), the big rail yards for now are in Anchorage and it's not unreasonable to presume that the locomotives are wintered there. Perhaps speed is of the essence, and it just so happens that you have a fast locomotive--the fastest, as a matter of the fact. It's used to burning lignite or sub-bituminous coal and has the bulky diamond stack. Now, you load it with anthracite or bituminous coal since that's what you've got, but have neither the time nor, really, the need to switch the stacks. And off you go.

It could well be that I'm wrong. But for the moment--barring some jarring counter-evidence--I think I'm going to say that all the evidence I have points to the Balto locomotive as number 601--an engine that started its life in Panama and has since been immortalised in my favourite movie. How fitting.

-Baikal

(Edited by Baikal at 2:53 am on May 17, 2003)