2-8-0 "Consolidation" Steam Locomotives in the USA

Class 52/1 (Locobase 16695)

Data from "Order No. B-1656, Class 280 -164" American Locomotive Company builder's card released October 1924. See also "Nason, It's Heyday, & It's Decline", Centennial Sentinel newspaper issue of 26 May 1974, reproduced in part in the Prairie Historians, Volume 12, June 1982, Issue 2, archived on line on the Jefferson County, IL genealogical website at [], last accessed 31 July 2025.Works number 65978 in October 1924.

Consolidations fitted with 21' x 28" cylinders constituted a small cohort within the hundreds of 2-8-0s produced over the years. Brooks produced the only three Alcos with that cylinder volume that rolled on 54" drivers. At that late date, ordering a standard 2-8-0 without a superheater was rare as well.

Coal traffic was to be the 52's principal mission.Albert J Nason had dreams of mining one of the last coal seams in Illinois, this one measuring 8-10 feet thick. He founded a model town bearing his last name and described 50 years later as "well zoned, landscaped with parks, and the streets curved about in an interesting pattern. Lands were set aside for each church, and in the center was to be a public swimming pool." It lay southeast of Centralia and northwest of Waltonville.

At the time the mine was the most artistic and modern mine in Illinois. For a while, the town of Nason boomed to a maximum 0f 1,500 residents. The JSW, built with "all possible speed", ran a twice-daily train to nearby Mt Vernon, through which several trunk lines ran. But the city's prosperity depended on the mine. Although the first shaft, which plunged 725 feet, was finished in time to deliver the first takings by Christma 1923, it didn't prosper. Quicksand intrusion, water, and lack of demand doomed the mine to close by 1927

Nason, Illinois quickly collapsed and most of the residents fled. Signs of abandoned hope appeared as "things got so bad in Nason that about 80 houses burned to the ground and the insurance collected, It got so that you couldn't even get insurance on one.

"Calvin Darnell lived in Nason when he was a child and recalls that people took their clothes and left, leaving their homes furnished and would even leave dishes containing food sitting on the table. It was as though suddenly the people had just disappeared. He said that stores were abandoned in the same fashion, and that kids began to haul furniture from a store there to furnish their club houses with it. In fact some of the club houses were better furnished than their homes."

Stacy Jones's 1989 article in the Prairie Historians described the town as "a dislocated, quiet little village, with no post office by name ...Someone recently said 'Nason is the only place in the United States where you can go quail hunting and never get off the side-walk.'".

Yet, the 52 was a reasonably powerful freight locomotive offering a relatively low axle loading. So after the JSW disposed of its two locomotives, North Carolina's Laurinburg & Southern bought it to operate on its 28 miles (45 km) of track southwest of Fayetteville near the South Carolina border. In 1936 the L&S sold the locomotive to locomotive rebuilder/reseller Birmingham Rail & Locomotive.

BR&L soon found a buyer in the Sydney & Louisburg based in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. In 1951, the S&L sold the 52 to Cumberland Rail & Coal (also of Nova Scotia), which ended the 52's caaeer by scrapping it in 1951.