Fun fact about Matthias Baldwin (the founder of the company). He was an avid anti-slaver, and during the American Civil War began prep for his company to fully integrate the workforce. When the slaves were free, some were able to find work at the BLC, and were welcomed with open arms. Sadly, M. Baldwin did not live long after this, and passed away a year after the ACW.
@@AnimeSunglasses the Pullman company also employed a lot of freed slaves. Many of them working in dining cars or as stewards. While by our standards the pay was kinda crap (a few dollars per day), back then it was considered pretty good money. Factor in that their uniforms, room, board, and food was all paid for, the money they made was basically theirs minus any taxes. And it didn't take long for them to build up a nice little nestegg with which they could start a family and buy a house.
@@Tank50us At that time, that was considered a very good job opportunity for black people. But it was a very difficult job with long hours. There are some good books on it such as "Those Pullman Blues" and "Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class".
The Pullman Porters union members invested wisely with a few tips to "George " from the cigar smoking fat cat barons in the dinner and lounge cars. A success story.
I have to agree that this is a engine that would be a strong candidate for restoration and being put back into some kind of limited service as a tourist train.
@@dark_one1337 All her bearings are shot from being shuttled back-and-forth a few feet at a time for years by a screw mechanism. Why the franklin institute ever thought that was a good idea at all, I'll never know. Also, the same issues that made the railroads reject it would be a major headache for modern tourist operations. The maintenance costs on the unconventional water-tube firebox AND the extra cylinder, with associated running gear, would be astronomical, even compared to similar-sized steam locomotives.
Sadly I think what killed 60000 was her water tube firebox. Watertube fireboxes and boilers are fantastic in things like a marine application, where on a ship, you have multiple boilers to power it so the long and often maintenance required on the boilers is a non-issue. But on a locomotive? It's just not worth it, and if the tube bursting was sorted with better quality tubes (perhaps partnering with Babcock and Wilcox or the US Navy which was using water tube boilers), I still firmly believe that the maintenance in the firetube firebox required put so many companies off 60000
Nigel Gresley found the same with his No 10000 4-6-4 on the LNER, a four-cylinder compound. It was later rebuilt with a conventional boiler as a three-cylinder simple (non-compound), in which form it was presumably satisfactory since it lasted until 1959, approximately as long as other conventional locos of its era.
The conventional firebox with water spaces around it to absorb the heat and raise steam was so effective that nobody has particularly wanted an alternative. Firebricks were tried in the Paget engine and Bulleid's Leader and were unsuccessful. A normal firebox does need lots of stays (hundreds in fact) which is a lot of work, but once built, is low-maintenance as long as stays are checked for corrosion. Railways were already used to this outlay so saw no reason to change.
@@cr10001 Worth noting however that 10000 had a water-tube boiler whereas 60000 just had a water-tube firebox with a conventional firetube boiler. Interesting though that they both suffered the same problems of bursting tubes. Apparently Hungary mastered this with ~1000 engines built with the similar Brolan boiler.
@@iankemp1131 yeah plus firebrick isn't needed for a coal burning locomotive, but it is very useful for an oil burning locomotive and oil burning boilers in general.
@@bostonrailfan2427 Higher efficiency, higher power output, but higher up front cost and higher maintenance cost. From a quality control perspective this indicates a failure to consider costs as a quality factor. BTW, the Baldwin 6000's tradition has been long followed up by the Concept Car. It served the very same purpose, except this time it was sadly not intentional.
Also Southern Pacific eventually got 4-10-2s of their own. and just like 60000, one of the Southern Pacific's 4-10-2s number 5021 is on display as of today
@@nathandeal9703 Unfortunately, I think the complexity of the design is why SP didn't take it. 60000 was a 3-cylinder Compound loco with a water-tube firebox. SP already had a sizeable fleet fo 4-10-2's with "simple" cylinders and regular fireboxes
In fact she didn't have a water-tube boiler - only a water-tube firebox with a conventional firetube boiler. Quite sensible in theory as it avoids the need for stays to hold the firebox in shape. But the Brotan boiler on the same principles had over 1000 examples in Hungary, so 60000 wasn't unique.
Having seen this thing up-close, and having ridden in its cab when I was very young, this thing is a behemoth. I always wondered why it wasn't ever used on a heritage railway... Then I learned about how much it weighed. You can still find it today at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Penn., USA.
@@ROBERTN-ut2il I don't recall it ever running on compressed air. When I worked there in the '70s the locomotive was moved 10 feet back and forth via an electric motor and screw drive in the floor. The exhibit where it is housed is being revamped with at least one locomotive having been already moved to the RR Museum of Pennsylvania.
Honestly it’s amazing how she’s basically a brand new locomotive. Everything about 60000 is brand new and barely run in, so “TECHNICALLY” you could just clean up the internals. Lube everything and make sure all is well, throw a fire and some water in her and she’ll probably run
Sitting almost still for almost a century will have it's effects though. Anything that requires a seal will need to be replaced and the boiler will probably need to be replaced entirely
@@towcatto that end, 60000 has been sitting under a roof in a climate controlled environment the last 50-60 years. If the boiler is in that bad of shape from sitting in a controlled environment, there’s bigger issues at hand. Take N&W 611 for example, which prior to its most recent restoration, had been sitting on display, also under a roof, since the 90s. When the Virginia Transportation Museum decided to restore her to operation in 2015, they had the engine under steam in a matter of MONTHS following her ultrasound and boiler retube. Granted, I don’t know if 60000 was stored serviceable like 611 was. If it was, then she’d be a pretty interesting engine to see under steam. As it stands, let’s be grateful that the engine is in preservation as a testament to Baldwin proving themselves capable of producing modern superpower engines
I've had the opportunity to see this locomotive a couple of times, and am still amazed whenever I get close to it. I also read in an article that the Franklin Institute is planning on refurbishing the "Train Factory" room (where #60000 is housed) so that it's possible to walk under this engine, and remember a book about railroads in Pennsylvania stating that the top of #60000's smokestack just barely grazed the ceiling as it was being rolled in.
Another fun fact about the Institute installing this locomotive is that they actually built the room just for it, leaving the wall undone until the locomotive was in place. Then they finished the wall, sealing it in.
@@Stephan_Rothstein Makes sense, considering the engine might not fit elsewhere in the building and that they wouldn't want to build a wall prior to having #60000 put in place.
Nice photo of an Erie 2-8-4 in the intro. The Erie 3300 series Berkshires were something special. Baldwin actually built 35 S-3 class 2-8-4s for the Erie in 1928. Hopefully the 3300s will someday be the topic of a video.
6000 is my absolute favourite locomotive. A 4-10-2 (favourite wheel arrangement) and a compound?! That is the coolest thing ever! What a shame that no one wanted her... I want her.
@@ThePTBRULES They built more than that... A lot more than that. She was built in 1926, and Baldwin continued producing steam locomotives until roughly 1949.
My eyes lit up when I seen this video I been on that train so many times at the Franklin institute, I love the story of how they moved it from Baldwin to FI by laying tracks down the middle of the street and taking out the wall of the museum to fit her in the building , def some great photos of the event out there
As soon as you said it had a third cylinder I thought, ah, that's a big reason it wasn't successful in the US right there. With more loading gauge to play with, railroads in the US preferred dual cylinders almost exclusively due to maintenance considerations.
To go a bit more deeper into it and something this video kind of glosses over is there was a time where America embraced compounding with Vauclain compounds everywhere. The Vauclain system was a Baldwin design, and countless engines were built with it when new from the factory (including the what are now known as the DRGW K-27 engines). Since American railroads often had steep track gradients with rapid changes from moving up and down, it was seen as a way to conserve steam on uphill climbs giving the fireman a chance to stoke the flames on a downhill run through the efficiency gains in compounding. The problem was that the Vauclain system was a shop-queen, something that proved more problematic in the repair bay than any gains it got on the road through efficiency. By the time Lima came about with "superpower" as a concept, Vaulclain was dead and dozens of major railroads in the nation had sworn off compounding in single engine locomotives. Superpower, boosters, improved superheating, etc. was all seen as solutions that solved the problems Vauclain was originally meant to address. Only some Mallets still had compound cylinders where it was seen as less of a repair issue as it was in more compact single engine designs. The only other major compounding in a single engine design we would see would eventually be some Gresley style designs that UP and SP would use that were built by ALCO who had rights to use Gresley's triple cylinder design in America, and I know a UP example is preserved in Southern California on display in the RailGiants Museum at the Ponoma Fairplex.
@@gamerfan8445 Exactly. In the UK, despite its restricted loading gauge which limited cylinder size, two-cylinder engines were preferred for post-war designs to avoid maintenance of internal machinery. In the US, outside cylinders could be big enough to give any desired tractive effort, especially with two sets of driving wheels and cylinders.
Nice work. Bill Withuhn suggests that 60000 was marginly more efficient than the locomotives she ran trials against - whilst being significantly more complicated. Baldwin had built only one first tier three-cylinder locomotive other than 60000, had never built a three-cylinder compound, and hadn't put any effort into compounding since the technology they rolled out circa 1905. 60000's failure must have hit Mr. Vauclain's ego pretty hard.
I can't say if it's the compound principle or the water tube fire box which did put railroads off from ordering this locomotive. Low maintenance cost and high availability always have been a strong point of most American locomotives, and in a country with cheap fuel and relatively expensive workforce at the time the savings in fuel from 60000 couldn't outweigh its higher maintenance demand. That was different in Europe where the cost aspects were the opposite and more fuel efficient locomotives although needing more maintenance had success.
I believe that I read somewhere that 60000 being too heavy is a common myth, as railroads already had heavier locomotives at the time (if someone could confirm or deny this would be great). Something that I don't hear talked about is her absolutely behemoth size, challenging that of the FEF-3s and WM 2-10-0s. I have seen her with my own eyes, and I really wish she wasn't sitting in a building collecting dust, but at least she is cared for.
60000 is one of my favorite none PRR conventional locomotives, I guess partially because it isn't super conventional for the US. Something about a rigid frame loco just has a character an articulated doesn't have. That and I for some reason much prefer the look of a 4-10-2 over other x-10-x layouts, it just looks "more correct" to me.
The firebox on the 60000 is called a McClellan firebox. There was one railroad that did buy into them, albeit on Alco 4-8-2s, The New Haven. By the time that 60000 was erected, the defects in the water tube fireboxes were well known as the New Haven had had to deal with leaky fireboxes that flexed, causing broken welds and insulation to fall out so that the fireboxes drew cold air on to the fire. New Haven Power has an interesting section on those fireboxes. The McClellan firebox was one of those ideas that looked good on paper but not working on the rails.
It seems that a similar design called the Brolan firebox was used in Hungary and they built lots of engines that way, so they presumably found ways to live with them. But no other European countries adopted them.
Nice to have a statue you can be proud of without reservations. Albany just yanked down the century-old one memorializing a slave-owning Revolutionary War general, which was a long time coming considering how much the African-American demographic has grown in the city over the years.
I got to see 60000 when my dad and I went from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in 1970. Dad had a Penn State conference to attend, and I got to visit my maternal grandparents. Grandfather took me to the Franklin Institute; step-grandmother took me to ride the Metroliner; both of them took me to visit the Strasburg Rail Road. It was a great trip. . .
For those of you who don’t live near Philadelphia, I have an interesting story from my childhood. It was roughly 1960 when I was part of a group of kids visiting the Franklin Institute, and walking into the room where 60,000 is displayed I was awed by the size of this wonderful locomotive. What I did not realize at the time was that the staff of the Franklin Institute had installed an electric motor and a jack screw between the gage under the engine, which allowed the engine to be moved back-and-forth several feet. Now, picture an eight year old boy in the cab of the engine, trying every lever and valve that is exposed…..and suddenly, the engine begins to move………….
And for a long time (in the 1980's & 90's?) that jackscrew was out of service. But I understand they fixed it up a few years back as part of a major renovation of the train room. Also, in the 60's through the 70's, every Christmas they would set up a huge model railroad in the train room. They no longer display this, but I understand the layout has been displayed in 30th street station. I'd love to see that layout again. Sadly, the Franklin Institute has changed a lot since my day. Not a lot remains of the old museum, replaced by flashy glitz that appeals to the younger generations. But the engine remains, and so does the Heart.
In fact I think the heart has been rehabbed a couple of times since I first saw it, probably in the middle 1960's on a school trip. There used to be some flaps that were supposed to be like the valves in the heart, those are long gone now. I imagine the heart takes a bit of abuse from thousands of school kids every year. Still one of my favorite exhibits because I was born with heart problems that had to be surgically corrected.
Railroads didn’t want this locomotive because they had found out that simpling articulated compounds resulted in large increases in power and performance while reducing maintenance costs. They weren’t interested in efficiency nearly as much as they were interested in pulling more at a faster rate without any three-cylinder complex maintenance nightmares to suck up valuable shop time. Only one railroad had ever expressed any interest at all in water-tube boilers and despite all their promise the B&O never found a way to make them work well enough to rate a commitment. One look at the jumble of rods behind the cylinders in the builder’s photo would have been enough to send any mechanic fleeing and screaming.
As somebody who lived in Lima for two years, let me help with pronunciation, haha. The “I” sound is like “eye”. L-eye-Ma. Just in case they come up in other videos later. 👍🏻
Ive seen this thing at the Franklin Insitute loads of times, but I had no idea it was working over in Morrisville (next town over from me). Tbh, I would rather it go to the PRM like the Reading Rocket, but its still pretty cool to see a steam locomotive in Center City
The whole point of them is that they're easier to build and take less maintenance. With a box tender you need to have a ton of plates rivetted together, while a Vanderbilt can be made with a few rolled sheets. They also require less maintenance because a circle can handle fluids and pressure much better than a square. However, the shortened range of Vanderbilts is what drove away most people like the AT&SF and UP, who need as much range as possible.
Baldwin 60000 was the first steam locomotive that I ever rode in. As a child, the Franklin Institute was one of my favorite places in the world, and I was down there most weekends. The locomotive was one of my favorite exhibits. The Institute had left it open for the visitors to climb on and into and see everything about the cab and tender. Periodically, they would evacuate the locomotive and line up everyone who wanted a ride. If you were one of the lucky ones to get back in, they had electric winches underneath it that would move it about 20 feet forward, then back to where it had been. I still love trains and that is a big part of why. I now model railroads and wish I could get a model of the Baldwin 60000.
Correction to my memory. Per @arthouston7361, it was a jackscrew and electric motors, not winches. I did not remember how they made it move, just that it was through electric power.
This locomotive used to have a fun addition to it while being an exhibit where you can fiddle with the knobs and levers to learn how it works. I remember this because I got to see it when I was a kid. She's still there too. Quite an amazing machine to stand next to, if I do say so myself. Pennsylvania's history with railroads is a big reason why I feel proud to have been born in this state.
Baldwin made some fantastic superpower locomotives (for example the Yellowstones they built for the DM&IR were the best articulateds made IMO), but at the end of the day, their bread and butter were smaller locomotives that were well-built and affordable
Baldwin: “This will be the best 3-cylinder steam locomotive ever!” ALCo: “I’m about to end this mans whole career” * pulls out THEIR 4-10-2’s and 4-12-2’s *
SP's and UP's Alco ones came first. Samuel Vaclain at Baldwin essentially built it as a "oh yeah we can build one too" flex that coincided with having a 60000th engine in production.
Not really, many roads across America had Texas or Santa Fe types which had 10 coupled sets. The real issue lies in the third cylinder and water tube boiler which made most roads shy away.
I personally saw this locomotive inside the basement of the Franklin Institute, During World War II because of the war effort they were considering of bringing the 60000 back into revenue service but was dropped, Had it been put back into service the locomotive would've proved itself but could've very likely been scrapped due to dieselization after the war in the 50s
It is curious that in the same year, ALCO built a 3-cylinder, compound locomotive, with a 4-12-2 wheel arrangement, (the 9000 class) that, while not entirely successful, (long rigid wheelbase, complex servicing of the center crank) ended up having 88 examples built (mostly) for the UP, in the next 4 years, with the last one being retired in 1956 - with only one, the original prototype, being preserved. Perhaps the issue with the 60000 was too many technical leaps all at once.
Baldwin didn't sell any three-cylinder 4-10-2s, but ALCO did. ALCO sold 49 to the Southern Pacific and 10 to the Union Pacific. All were simple-expansion (simplex), not compound. The Southern Pacific 4-10-2s had relatively long service lives of almost thirty years. The Union Pacific locomotives survived almost as long, but their careers included being rebuilt as two-cylinder locomotives.
If you visit her at the Franklin Institute, you can also see pictures of the move when she was first installed. Track had to be laid in the street to bring her in through an open wall.
For people who (like me) don't know that much about locomotives, a mallet type engine has it's front wheels drive wheels on a swivelling boggie which allows it to have far more drive wheels.
If you like locomotives that were interesting and a one off while being excellent I’d recommend looking into the Victorian railways H class or heavy harry really interesting story it also helped start railway preservation in Australia
Lima concentrated on higher firebox efficiency- burning coal at a lower rate per square foot per hour. The 60000 kept beating the compound dead horse- trying to squeeze all the energy out the steam(with corresponding counterbalance problems because of the large cylinders ) I'm not saying that compounds were bad on roads like the N&W which had a lot of curves and grades hence restricted speeds.
The Loading Gauge has nothing to do with the weight of a locomotive on the track, but everything to do with height, width and length; so, will it fit through tunnels and under bridges, will it foul any lineside structures, etc? Weight on the rails is a different thing entirely.
Nuts that the Union Pacific didn’t want this loco Then again, they did have the 9000s, so maybe just one class of heavy freight locomotives without articulated wheels was enough
And imagine later down the line they reject future baldwin steamers due to steam being unefficient... I can see they going off like yeah well you turned down our most efficient locomotive x years ago remember...
60000 doesn't just stand on display, it moves back and forth on a short stretch of track in the Franklin Institute Railroad Hall. So often and for so long its wheels are egg shaped.
Seems to me that US railroad management just refused to accept any advances unless they got a BIG saving in money right away AND got the right sustained marketing pitch, like from diesel locomotives. This continues into modern times, in which they absolutely refuse to consider electrification. Meanwhile, they give their (now all freight) customers bad service and treat their workers like dirt (witness the fight over paid sick leave last winter, which the workers lost). Barons from the First Gilded Age, still acting as such in the Second Gilded Age.
(4:10) i thought Baldwin only made small tank engines and diesels for australia, since when were bigger tender engines made from them to go to australia?