Northern (locomotive)
With Northern are steam locomotives with the wheel arrangement referred 2'D2 ', ie with a leading end bogie , four driving axles and a trailing-axle tow frame.
Names
The first locomotive with this wheel arrangement was only built in 1926 - a month before the first Hudson (2'C2 ') - making the Northern one of the youngest wheel arrangements. The design got its name from the Northern Pacific Railway , for which the first locomotive with this wheel arrangement was built.
However, some railways have not adopted the name Northern , so that this type of construction is sometimes also referred to as Confederation (in Canada), Niagara (in the New York Central Railroad ), Pocono (in the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad ) and other terms.
history
The first Northern, the ALCO built locomotive No. 2600 of the Northern Pacific Railway, was designed for the combustion of lignite with a low calorific value , so that a 10.7 m² grate and a correspondingly large standing boiler were required for the required output that a single running axle was no longer sufficient. The locomotive was successful and the design was soon copied by other railways. Northern locomotives represented a good compromise between speed and tractive power and could be used as universal locomotives both in front of express trains and in front of not too heavy freight trains .
In North America (Canada, USA and Mexico) a total of 1126 Northern were built between 1926 and 1950, of which the Canadian National Railway owned the most with 203 pieces.
The fastest speed measured on a Northern under controlled conditions was achieved by the Class J shown on the Norfolk & Western Railroad . Despite its driving wheels , which are not very large at 1778 mm , locomotive No. 610 reached a speed of 177 km / h in comparison runs with class T1 of the Pennsylvania Railroad . Other locomotives, such as the NYC Class S-1 (Niagara) and the ATSF Class 2900, are said to have even higher speeds. All of these locomotives regularly exceeded the 100 mph limit (161 km / h) in daily operation, making them the fastest quadruple coupled locomotives ever.
Northern locomotives were rather rare in Europe. The largest number of vehicles , 251 pieces were in the Soviet Union, ten in Spain, two in Germany and one in France. However, the two German class 06 locomotives had several defects, and after the war it was not worth reconstructing the two individual pieces, so they were retired early. On the other hand, the French 242 A , a conversion from a 2'D1 'made in 1946 under the direction of André Chapelon , was very successful . With a cylinder output of up to 5700 hp, it was the most powerful European steam locomotive, and only the transition to electric and diesel operation prevented the construction of further locomotives of this type.
The longest used Northern were the 140 locomotives of class 25 and 25 NC of the South African Railways , built from 1953 onwards , 90 of which were equipped with a condensation tender. Quite a few of the locomotives were not retired until the 1990s. The no. 844 of Union Pacific Railroad is continuous from 1944 to today in use inventory, but drives since about 1960 only special trains .
literature
- Wilhelm Reuter: record locomotives . 2nd Edition. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-87943-582-0 .