Re: A Rhetorical Question

ALCO owned the US patent rights to the Garratt design and some proposals were made, including some giant double Garratts, but nothing ever came of them.

Unless the rear bunker was entirely devoted to coal, a Garratt wouldn't have had the coal capacity of a large US tender. If the entire bunker was used for coal (as was done in South Africa with the GMAM Garratts), then an auxiliary water car would have to be carried to supplement the front tank anyway, so why not just go with a normal articulated (or big conventional engine) with a standard tender? I suspect that this was the line of reasoning in the US.

Garratts had some real advantages, such as the ability to use large drivers not restricted in size by a boiler or firebox above them, lower center of gravity and excellent stability at speed, but none of this mattered much to the US roads that did use big articulated power. Lightly built lines, where a Garratt would have excelled, were generally not having new power built for them, so the market just wasn't there.

David Wardale, in his book "The Red Devil" discussed the ACE project and felt that a Garratt design might have been the best solution there as well, but that's another project that went nowhere.

Michael Allen