Updated 8 December 2004 by Bruce A. Metcalf, bruce.metcalf@figzu.com, who would very much appreciate your comments and corrections.
The purpose of this paper is to enable researchers to quickly and easily identify and locate steam locomotives used on the Rio Grande family of companies in (primarily) Colorado and Utah. By the use of tables, indices, extensive cross-linking, and a full bibliography, the author hopes to ease the study of this topic.
The paper is presently limited to locomotives that were, at some point in their lives, consolidations (2-8-0 or 2-8-0T wheel arrangements). Assuming sufficient time and financial support come available at some future date, the author hopes to be able to expand coverage to include all steam locomotives on these lines.
Publishers, be they print, www, or CD-ROM, are encouraged to contact the author about publication rights.
This paper is presently undergoing the process of conversion from paper to HTML. As a result, some sections may be poorly formatted. I ask your indulgence during this conversion, and invite you to return from time to time as I continue with the conversion process. Please do not let this deter you from notifying me of any factual errors discovered -- such will always get first priority, particularly if you can assist me by providing citations to your sources.
In attempting to research the origins of the locomotives a shortline purchased from the "Rio Grande", I discovered a severe lack of comprehensive locomotive rosters for this family of companies. Yes, there are numerous rosters for the Denver & Rio Grande, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and others, but none that have come to light allow the tracking of individual locomotives from the builder through all the various corporate incarnations of the "Rio Grande", and on to subsequent operators and scrapping.
Further, in preparing individual road rosters, some authors appear to have confused the different corporate names, renumberings, and reuse of numbers and names, exacerbating the problem of identification across corporate boundaries. So too, the frequent lack of scholarly credits in this field make it very hard to say who has taken information from whom, and upon what original source material the various rosters are based.
In the fields of industrial archaeology, museum studies, and railway preservation (including preservation in miniature, as some call model railroading); practitioners are often in need of different data -- or at least of data organized differently -- than the field of railroad history. In these fields, it is the individual pieces of equipment that are the focus of interest, rather than the agencies employing them. As a result of this different approach, interest in a particular locomotive is not diminished when one company is through with it. Indeed, it is often the rambling history of the individual units that make them of interest, particularly when they have survived to be included in a museum's collection.
Conventional rosters focus on one specific railroad company, its operating patterns, financing, construction, or personalities, and what its locomotives can tell us about them. Such works exist in abundance, and the attempt here is not to imitate or replace them.
The purpose of this paper is, instead, to offer a view from a different perspective than most of the railroad history literature. To organize information about locomotives -- as individuals and as groups of similar equipment -- with an eye toward the study of the life cycle of the equipment, and to create a better tool for the study of the locomotive, as opposed to the study of the railroad.
In order to control the size of this project, two restrictions were applied: Only one wheel arrangement is covered, the Consolidation type or 2-8-0, which here refers to any unit that was a 2-8-0 (or 2-8-0T) at any time in its history. Locomotives of the Consolidation type have seen continuous service in the Colorado region from 1877 to the present day, thus they provide commentary on nearly the entire complex corporate history to date.
The second restriction was to have been that only locomotives used on the Rio Grande core group (as defined in the following section) were included. However, as many locomotives acquired from other roads were part of larger classes, and as it was felt desirable to provide references to all locomotives of any one class, the list has been expanded to include classmates of units used on the Rio Grande core group. A few strays were also included where their Rio Grande affiliation has been suggested in the literature (sometimes inaccurately), or where title has belonged -- however briefly -- to the Rio Grande core group.
A total of 491 units have been identified to date and included in this paper. Both narrow and standard gauge locomotives are included, as are details of rebuildings to and from other wheel arrangements, as a number of units changed gauge or wheel arrangement during their life.
It seems most appropriate that this examination of the Rio Grande locomotives be based on the Consolidation type, as the original "Consolidation" (built in 1866) was so named in honor of the "consolidation" of several lines into the Lehigh Valley -- another road who acquired more track through corporate merger than through construction [Pennypacker pp. 18-19].
Well suited to steep and crooked terrain, and to the low-speed operation it dictated, 2-8-0s seem to have been the most popular wheel arrangement in "Rio Grande country", as they were in the country as a whole, exceeded in sheer numbers (but not in unit-years) only by the 4-4-0. During the late nineteenth century, the Consolidation represented about the largest locomotive that could be used on many lines, with rail and bridge loadings, turntable and roundhouse length, curvature, drawbar strength, and braking limitations all conspiring to prevent significant growth in the size of locomotives [Swengle p. 16].
While the Rio Grande system's last Consolidations -- for both standard and narrow gauge service -- were built in the first decade of the twentieth century, their appropriateness to the terrain and traffic of the region kept them in service until the very end of mainline steam on the system in the 1950s. The arrival of larger power and the passage of time may have relegated these aging Consolidations to steadily less glamorous duties, but the need for the relatively light, flexible, and especially paid-for Consolidations kept them in continuous service -- if not on the Rio Grande system proper, then in lease service.
During the thirty years of active locomotive construction, the size and tractive effort of the narrow gauge Consolidations increased by a factor of about two, while the standard gauge units tripled in size. Few locomotive designs (with the obvious exception of the American) were built to such a range of capacities. The Consolidation in the period of study was to American railroading what the 4-4-0 had been to an earlier era -- the near universal locomotive design that could most easily be adapted to any application.
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This work was supported, in part, by the
Kalmbach Memorial Library, National Model Railroad Association. Copyright © 1992-2002, Bruce A. Metcalf. Updated 8 December 2004 by Bruce A. Metcalf, bruce.metcalf@figzu.com, who would very much appreciate your comments and corrections. |