Class Freeport (Locobase 16183)

Data from the 1914 List and Description of Locomotives on the Southern Railway supplied in March 2004 by Allen Stanley from his extensive Rail Data Exchange. See also DeGolyer, Volume 7, p. 101. Works numbers were 3632-3635 in August 1874.

These Eight-wheelers were four of five engines produced at the same time; the fifth went to the Milwaukee Road.

Angling southwest from the shore of Lake Michigan at Racine, Wisc, the WURR connected the Great Lakes system with the Mississippi River at Savanna, Illinois and thence down the left bank to Rock Island. Itself a merger of the Racine & Mississippi and Northern Illinois, the Western Union's route include the western Illinois towns Freeport, Beloit (Wisc) Lanark, and Mount Carroll that were given to these locomotives.

[Mount Carroll's Seminary, a progressive girl's boarding school then run by Frances Anne Wood Shimer and Cinderella M Gregory, would become Shimer College, an offshoot of the University of Chicago, in 1948. Locobase's editor graduated from Shimer in 1971, four years before the college left Mount Carroll. He also worked at the Milwaukee Road's roundhouse in Summer 1971.]

The Milwaukee renumbered the four several times. 1211 (ex-Freeport) was off the roster by 1910. The other three--now numbered 95-97--joined the 94 (see Locobase 16184) in class H3 until March and May 1918.

found itself leased to the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul in 1879.

NB: Locobase borrows the heating surface data associated with the Atlanta & Richmond 4-4-0s produced two years later to virtually identical dimensions; see Locobase 6514.

Class unknown (Locobase 16184)

Data from the 1914 List and Description of Locomotives on the Southern Railway supplied in March 2004 by Allen Stanley from his extensive Rail Data Exchange. See also DeGolyer, Volume 7, p. 101. Works numbers was 3657 in August 1874.

Locobase 16183 describes the four Eight-wheelers that went to the Western Union Railroad in 1874. This engine was included in that order, but unlike those locomotives, was merely numbered, not named. It would be grouped with three of the four engines in class H3.

[NB: Locobase borrows the heating surface data associated with the Atlanta & Richmond 4-4-0s produced two years later to virtually identical dimensions; see Locobase 6514.]