1.
Swiss locomotive and railcar classification
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It started out as a uniform system for the classification and naming of all rolling stock, powered and unpowered, but had been replaced and amended by the UIC classification of goods wagons. The Swiss classification system was created by the Swiss federal railways department, in 1902, when the Swiss Federal Railways was founded as a government railway, that new railway also became bound by the system. The Swiss system is less precise than those other systems in the way it deals with axles, because it refers only to numbers, rather than to arrangements, of powered axles. The Swiss system is more a method of classifying locomotive. The classifications for which the Swiss system provides have always been adapted to new requirements. The last modification to the system occurred in 1968, with the publication of the Directory of the Rolling Stock of the Swiss Private Railways by the Swiss Federal Agency for Transport. For carriages and wagons, the system was progressively replaced from 1968 by the UIC international wagon classification system. However, all of Switzerlands powered rolling stock initially retained its Swiss type classification or class designation, the standard gauge private railways of Switzerland soon followed the example of the Swiss Federal Railways, and agreement was reached as to the allocation of number ranges. The narrow gauge railways have largely retained the old system for locomotives, railcars and passenger carriages, here is a description of the classification system as it operated up to 1989, and as it still operates in respect of narrow gauge private railway motive power. There is no provision for combining the codes A, B, C, D, E, G, R and T, the combination of H and G is possible. HG would therefore be a narrow gauge locomotive, with a mix of adhesion, since 1966, in respect of railcars and tractors, he or hm has meant pure rack rail drive, and eh or mh has meant a mix of adhesion and rack rail drive. Steam powered tank locomotives were given an E, and the maximum speed of the locomotive was designated with a lower case letter. Thus, an Ea 3/6 was a locomotive with vmax >80 kilometres per hour. With steam locomotives, separate driving mechanisms were displayed, so, for example, a Mallet locomotive was named G 2x2/2 or G 2/3+2/2, and not G 4/4 or G 4/5. Up until 1920, standard gauge locomotives were given the letter F. The class later designated as Be 5/7 was therefore originally named Fb 5/7, the designation R was originally intended for locomotives with an axle load of under 16 tonnes. These lightweight locomotives exert less stress on the rails when they negotiate curves, with the introduction of the Re 4/4II, the axle load limit was dropped following extensive testing. Several locomotives were given approval for higher cornering speeds, to which their type designation had not yet been adapted
2.
Royal Saxon State Railways
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The Royal Saxon State Railways were the state-owned railways operating in the Kingdom of Saxony from 1869 to 1918. From 1918 until their merger into the Deutsche Reichsbahn the title Royal was dropped, after the completion of the privately financed Leipzig–Dresden railway in 1839, the Saxon parliament also began to get involved in railway construction. Early on it was recognised that railway lines to Bavaria, Bohemia and Silesia were needed, the funding of this plan lay in the hands of privately financed railway committees. The state, however, saw itself arranging for the political and legal hurdles to be cleared. On 14 January 1841 a treaty was agreed with the Kingdom of Bavaria, on 22 June 1841, the Saxon-Bavarian Railway Company was founded and on 19 September 1842 railway services between Leipzig and Altenburg station were opened. Because the construction costs exceeded the limits, the state had to jump in. On 1 April 1847 the railway line, which was finished as far as Reichenbach im Vogtland was transferred to state ownership, at the same time the Royal Saxon-Bavarian State Railway Division in Leipzig began work. Specific regulations were laid down by the state parliament, the board of directors was accordingly given the appropriate powers and was assigned directly to a state ministry. The payroll of the officials was to be approved by the state parliament, on 15 July 1851, the line to Hof was completed. Because no suitable private company had found to build the Saxony-Bohemian Railway from Dresden to Bodenbach. On 24 July 1843 a treaty was concluded with the Kingdom of Prussia for the construction of a route from Dresden via Bautzen to the Prussia towns of Görlitz. That made it possible to put in the important link to Breslau, on 1 September 1847, the 102 km long route from Dresden to Görlitz was opened by the Saxon-Silesian Railway, a private company that had formed with state support. On 31 January 1851 this company was transferred to state ownership, at the same time the running powers of the private Löbau-Zittau Railway Company were taken over. By combining the management of the two radiating from Dresden savings were supposed to be made. On 1 October 1853 the Royal Chemnitz-Riesa State Railway Division was established and it had the task of completing the construction of the Riesa–Chemnitz railway and running the line subsequently. This had been necessary, after the firm, the Chemnitz-Riesa Railway Company, had gone bankrupt due to the cost of structures needed between Waldheim und Döbeln. Unlike Prussia, Saxony never issued a railway law and this meant that every railway proposal had to be agreed in the state parliament. In spite of the experiences of the past, the next ten years saw an increase in the construction of state railways
3.
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad locomotives
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On the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, locomotives were always considered of great importance, and the railroad was involved in many experiments and innovations. The name Tom Thumb is forever associated with the B&O, as the first steam locomotive built in the United States for an American railroad. It was built strictly as a demonstrator, but it was succeeded by a series of locomotives designed by Ross Winans. Early B&O designs were quite unlike those used on roads, due to in-house design. 4-2-0 locomotives from Norris were the anomaly on a railroad which was already building eight-coupled locomotives well before the Civil War, by the beginning of the war, new power on the railroad had become more conventional, though many of the older, unconventional designs remained. Up until 1884 locomotive numbers were reused when locomotives were retired, in 1884, in order to reduce confusion, all locomotives were renumbered to group like locomotives together, and thereafter numbers were retired along with the locomotive to which they referred. John W. Garretts desire to have a line to New York led to the construction of the Baltimore Belt Line in order to bring the railroad across Baltimore. The most important feature of this was the Howard Street Tunnel, objections to use of steam led, in 1895, to the first main line electrification in North America. Trains in one direction were pulled through the tunnel, by a series of locomotives that lasted until the end of steam, in the other direction. Dieselization made the electrification unnecessary and it was discontinued in 1952, another innovation was the introduction of Mallet locomotives. Economies in haulage could be achieved by reducing the number of locomotives and trains needed, in 1900 #2400, a 0-6-6-0 design, was introduced, and quickly became known as Old Maude after a mule in a cartoon. Old Maude was renumbered to #7000 in 1915, and it boasted an impressive 71,500 pound tractive effort and was a success at a Maximum speed of only 21 mph. It was the first Mallet in North America, Mallets were built in large numbers for the B&O, culminating in the huge EM-1 2-8-8-4. In the presidency of Daniel Willard, the power department, headed by Col. George H. Emerson. Particular emphasis was placed on the water boiler, as opposed to the fire tube boiler used from the earliest days of steam. The culmination of these experiments was the duplex #5600 George H. Emerson and it was to be succeeded by a visionary locomotive of a unique design, of which very little was built before the whole project was cancelled. Many other trials were conducted of steam locomotive appliances, very few of which had any lasting impact, at the turn of the 20th century various compound locomotives were tried, particularly of the Vauclain and tandem patterns. As on other roads, they presented problems, and only the Mallets were repeated
4.
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
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The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad is one of the oldest railroads in the United States and the first common carrier railroad. At first this railroad was located entirely in the state of Maryland with a line from the port of Baltimore west to Sandy Hook. At this point to continue westward, it had to cross into Virginia over the Potomac River, adjacent to the confluence of the Potomac, from there it was extended to the Ohio River at Wheeling and a few years later also to Parkersburg, West Virginia. It is now part of the CSX Transportation network, and includes the oldest operational railroad bridge in the USA, the B&O also included the Leiper Railroad, the first permanent horse-drawn railroad in the U. S. In later years, B&O advertising carried the motto, Linking 13 Great States with the Nation, the B&O Warehouse at the Camden Yards rail junction in Baltimore now dominates the view over the right-field wall at the Baltimore Orioles current home, Oriole Park at Camden Yards. At the end of 1970 B&O operated 5552 miles of road and 10449 miles of track, not including the Staten Island Rapid Transit or the Reading and its subsidiaries. The fast-growing port city of Baltimore, Maryland faced economic stagnation unless it opened routes to the western states, as New York had done with the Erie Canal in 1820. In 1827, twenty-five merchants and bankers studied the best means of restoring that portion of the Western trade which has recently been diverted from it by the introduction of steam navigation and their answer was to build a railroad—one of the first commercial lines in the world. Two men — Philip E. Thomas and George Brown — were the pioneers of the railroad and they spent the year 1826 investigating railway enterprises in England, which were at that time being tested in a comprehensive fashion as commercial ventures. Their investigation completed, they held a meeting on February 12,1827, including about twenty-five citizens. Thomas was elected as the first president and Brown the treasurer, the capital of the proposed company was fixed at five million dollars, but the B&O was initially capitalized in 1827 with a three million dollar issue of stock. Virtually every citizen of Baltimore owned a share, as the offering was oversubscribed, construction began on July 4,1828, when Charles Carroll of Carrollton did the groundbreaking. The initial tracks were built with granite stringers topped by iron rails. The first section, from Baltimore west to Ellicotts Mills, opened on May 24,1830. Developers decided to follow the Patapsco River to a point near Parrs Ridge, a later compromise allowed the two companies to share the right of way. The State of Maryland granted the B&O a charter to build a line from Baltimore to Washington, D. C. in 1831, and the Washington Branch was opened in 1835. This line joined to the mainline at Relay, Maryland, crossing the Patapsco on the Thomas Viaduct. This line was funded by the state, and was operated separately until the 1870s
5.
Whyte notation
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The notation counts the number of leading wheels, then the number of driving wheels, and finally the number of trailing wheels, groups of numbers being separated by dashes. Other classification schemes, like UIC classification and the French, Turkish and Swiss systems for steam locomotives, in the notation a locomotive with two leading axles in front, then three driving axles and then one trailing axle is classified as 4-6-2. Articulated locomotives such as Garratts, which are two locomotives joined by a common boiler, have a + between the arrangements of each engine. Thus a double Pacific type Garratt is a 4-6-2+2-6-4, for Garratt locomotives the + sign is used even when there are no intermediate unpowered wheels, e. g. the LMS Garratt 2-6-0+0-6-2. This is because the two units are more than just power bogies. They are complete engines, carrying fuel and water tanks, the + sign represents the bridge that links the two engines. Simpler articulated types such as Mallets, have a frame under a common boiler where there are no unpowered wheels between the sets of powered wheels. Typically, the frame is free to swing, whereas the rear frame is rigid with the boiler. Thus a Union Pacific Big Boy is a 4-8-8-4, four leading wheels, one group of eight driving wheels, another group of eight driving wheels and this numbering system is shared by duplex locomotives, which have powered wheel sets sharing a rigid frame. No suffix means a tender locomotive, T indicates a tank locomotive, in European practice, this is sometimes extended to indicate the type of tank locomotive, T means side tank, PT pannier tank, ST saddle tank, WT well tank. T+T means a tank locomotive that also has a tender, in Europe, the suffix R can signify rack or reversible, the latter being Bi-cabine locomotives used in France. The suffix F indicates a fireless locomotive, other suffixes have been used, including ng for narrow-gauge and CA or ca for compressed air. In Britain, small diesel and petrol locomotives are classified in the same way as steam locomotives. This may be followed by D for diesel or P for petrol, thus 0-6-0DE denotes a six-wheel diesel locomotive with electric transmission. Where the axles are coupled by chains or shafts or are individually driven, thus 4wPE indicates a four-wheel petrol locomotive with electric transmission. For large diesel locomotives the UIC classification is used, the main limitation of Whyte Notation is that it does not cover non-standard types such as Shay locomotives, which use geared trucks rather than driving wheels. The most commonly used system in Europe outside the United Kingdom is UIC classification, based on German practice, in American practice, most wheel arrangements in common use were given names, sometimes from the name of the first such locomotive built. For example, the 2-2-0 type arrangement is named Planet, after the 1830 locomotive on which it was first used, the most common wheel arrangements are listed below
