Brazil National Railways 4-8-4 Locomotives in Brazil

Class 242N GELSA (Locobase 1127)

See also "Gelsa", a thread begun 21 November 2010 on the Logo

Les Forums de Passions MTtrique et Etroite !! at [], last accessed 14 April 2017. See also Brian Hollingsworth, "Gelsa Class 4-8-4" in The Great Book of Trains-Steam Passenger Locomotives (New York: Portland House, 1987), pp. 186-187. (Thanks to Teemu Koivumaki whose 2023 email included a comprehensive spreadsheet of Brazilian steam locomotive builders, works numbers, and owners.).

Andre Chapelon designed 90 metre-gauge engines in two wheel arrangements (66 2-8-4, 24 4-8-4) on behalf of the Groupment d'Exportation des Locomotives en Sud-Amerique (GELSA), a French consortium. They were built at the Locomotives Batignolles-Chatillon in Nantes. Locobase 1129 shows the 2-8-4s. This entry describes the 4-8-4s , which were delivered to four railways as follows:

Railways works numbers road numbers

Central of Brazil 872-873 1471-1472/631, 634 for EF Noroeste de Brasil

Vitoria a Minas 870-871, 888-893 201-208

RM de Viacao 650-655

Rio Grande do Sul 1101-1108

They had Belpaire fireboxes burning low-calorie coal and a combustion chamber (each with a Nicholson thermic syphon), a Worthington feed-water heater, double Kylchap blast-pipe stack. As completed, they had tall "elephant-ear" smoke lifters on each side of the firebox.

Hollingsworth wrote the prototype tests went well, the locomotives were delivered with Chapelon in attendance -- and little more was ever heard of them. He speculated that they proved unable to stand up to lower maintenance standards as readily as the less precise classes already in service. See Locobase 973 for a 4-8-4 delivered five years earlier by Alco.

Thierry Stora, of the French Compound Locomotives homepage, contends that the problems lay in the difference between the specified minimum curve radius (80 m or 262 ft) and the actual minimum, which could be as low as 50 m (164 ft). As a result, these 4-8-4s were limited to 50 mph (80 kph)