Re: Cold Water Brooks

MatthewM Wrote:
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> I can't imagine these locomotives
> were really that bad if the UP ordered over 40 of
> them for their narrow gauge system (Including the
> South Park and Colorado Central).

Just because they were ordered in quantity doesn't mean that they weren't lemons. At that time, builders hadn't necessarily locked in what the optimum ratios were in locomotive design. Even much later in history, there were designs coming out from established builders that "smelled of lemon" as one quote about one of the early 4-8-4 designs stated.

PRR's duplex designs are a case in point. Note that UP, Santa Fe, N&W and others ended steam operations with their newest and most advanced steam power, while PRR ended theirs with a pre WWI 0-6-0, all of their top of the line duplex engines having been retired years earlier for being failures in one way or another.

On Colorado's Great Western, 2-8-0 #60 was the newest locomotive on the roster by 13 years, yet it was the first one sold when diesels started to take over, due to her design shortcomings.

With advanced drafting such as that invented by Porta and others, it became possible to extract high horsepower out of surprisingly small boilers, but that knowledge wasn't understood prior to about the 1970's.