Baldwin proposal 2-8-8-8-8-2 Locomotives in the USA

Class 1915 (Locobase 16301)

Data from 31 August 2017 email from Chris Hohl that included a spreadsheet providing details. See also "Baldwin Works Design a Quadruplex Compound Locomotive", Railway and Locomotive Engineering, Volume 28, No 9 (September 1915) p.320; and Henry B Comstock, The Iron Horse (New York City: Galahad Books, 1971), p. 146.

The designer of the Erie's Triplex 2-8-8-8-2 apparently wasn't fully convinced that that engine represented the lengths to which someone could go to burn coal in one firebox and share it among several cylinders. So, even before the Triplex had "proved" itself, Baldwin's George R Henderson put forward the locomotive herein.

So what would one get? Eight cylinders, four HP and four LP. These would power the four driver sets arranged, when seen with the smokebox to the left, HP LP HP LP.. Steam would come from two boilers, the 22-foot section riding over the forward 1 1/2 driver sets and presenting 5,800 sq ft (538.84 sq m) in heating surface area. It was connected through an accordion joint that also contained a combustion chamber to the 17-foot long tubes in the rear boiler. These contributed 4,500 sq ft (418.06 sq m).

Continuing to the rear, a firebox 16 1/2 feet long and 9 feet wide had its backhead over the last driver in the third set. Then the fourth driver set was placed under the tender. As can be seen from the specs, this is where the design's efficiency would have most challenged by a very small firebox area and a modest superheater area.

One other unusual detail. A second engineer's position perched on the pilot deck ahead of the smokebox door.

Was this design ever going to enter production? Not a chance. But it affords Locobase the opportunity to describe a mythical locomotive cheekily presented in an early Railway Gazette and retrieved by Henry Comstock. He reprinted a cartoon drawn by Joseph Easley of the latest freight engine delivered to the New Orleans & Fiddler's Green.

What would later be described as a 4-18-0 rolled on drivers that were easily 50 feet high. This established the scale of this monumental engine, which dwarfed the town at which it was briefly pausing. .Apparently driven only by two mighty cylinders at the smokebox, the connecting rods turned all of the drivers.

Easley's locomotive "took 7 miles of the Mississippi River to fill her boiler, and they cleaned her 42 acres of flues by running an old Erie engine with a snowplow through them."

So gargantuanism was not new in 1915.