Hardaway Contracting Company 0-4-0 "Switcher" Locomotives in the USA

Class 118 (Locobase 15055)

Data from Roy V Wright (Ed.) 1916 Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, Fourth Edition (New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Company, 1916), p. 152. See also "North Carolina Water-Power Plant," Cement and Engineeering News, Vol 28, No 9 (September 1917), pp. 233-234. (Thanks to Chris Hohl for his 8 February 2019 correcting the given value of 1,600 tons of fuel to the 0.8 tons that it converts to.) Works numbers were 54610-54612 in March 1914.

Hardaway Contracting was a heavy construction firm that built dams, roads, army camps. Locobase suspects that the series of 0-4-0 saddle tanks bought from various Alco works (Pittsburgh, Rogers, Cooke) were built to the same design as the three shown in this entry.

One of Hardaway's big projects was a hydroelectric plant erected on the Narrows of the Yadkin River below Whitney, NCal. Planned for over a decade, the project stalled when the French company that contracted for the dam in 1913 saw most of its French workers go home when World War One broke out. Eventually Alcoa bought the half-finished plant and paid a "bargain price" (according to Rowan County's history at []) to complete it.

The dam was engineered to be 220 feet (67 m) high, 1,300 feet (396.2 m) long, 160 feet (48.8 m) thick at the base, and 20 feet (6.1 m) thick at the crestline. The reservoir forming behind it--later named Badin Lake--would cover 5,000 acres (7.8 sq miles/20.2 sq km).

As this project is described as "one of the greatest construction projects of this kind in the South, or in the world, for that matter." At the time of the original contract in 1913, the concrete order was the third largest ever placed, behind only that for the Panama Canal and the New York City subway system.

Twenty-two locomotives were deployed on the railway system built to serve this site and it's likely that one of those engines was this oil-burning saddle tank. (If not, at least now the reader has heard of this mega-project.)