When Precision Craft Models released their HO-scale Y6b, it touched off a firestorm of interest, both in the model and the prototype. The model is a very lovely, diecast product that runs well and sounds pretty good. It pulls very nicely and represents a dandy package. Still, the release and our resulting review set in motion the largest single topic response in our RPO Letters column. From what well is all this interest drawn?
I am a bit of a historian, so I love to delve into past connections that point to modern-day events. The Norfolk & Western was a storybook railroad, not only in its quaint Abdington Branch, but also in its mainline operation. Few railroads in America ever operated on a better-kept right-of-way. The Company warned engine crews that “Smoke is Waste” and so stacks might belch white steam, but they’d better not billow black smoke. N&W was a mountain railroad and started buying and building articulated steam locomotives back in 1910 and the last mainline steam locomotive constructed in America for American use was an N&W Y6b.
I am a bit of a historian, so I love to delve into past connections that point to modern-day events. The Norfolk & Western was a storybook railroad, not only in its quaint Abdington Branch, but also in its mainline operation. Few railroads in America ever operated on a better-kept right-of-way. The Company warned engine crews that “Smoke is Waste” and so stacks might belch white steam, but they’d better not billow black smoke. N&W was a mountain railroad and started buying and building articulated steam locomotives back in 1910 and the last mainline steam locomotive constructed in America for American use was an N&W Y6b.
The actual graph image is of a Y6b, as it turns out. I set the base unit value to railroads number 9 and 10, with 91 articulated units each. NYC was the only non-mountain railroad on this list; but it had made mountains out of molehills with its hump yards. Interestingly, if you add up numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10, you still don’t equal Number One, the Norfolk & Western.
N&W’s articulateds fell into three basic groups: the Z classes, 2-6-6-2 types; the Y classes, 2-8-8-2, and the A classes, 2-6-6-4 types; although, the first articulateds on that railroad were five X class 0-8-8-0s. By 1952, when the last of the Y6s were being built and the Great Steam Cut-up had not begun, N&W had around 400 articulateds drawn from all three groups still in operation.
This remarkable railroad one-upped nearly everyone when they chose to build most of their later steam engines. They took the Y-classes in-house in 1930 with the Y4a and kept redesigning it with their own design engineers. The A and A1 classes of 2-6-6-4 speedsters were a total N&W project, from the first pencil marks until these fabulous freighters thundered on N&W’s high iron. The J-class 4-8-4s, though not articulated, were another aspect of Roanoke’s design and construction prowess.
This icon of American railroading ruthlessly attracted railfans of all sorts. O. Winston Link took pictures here, recorded sound, and even experimented with night flash photography. He was far from alone, and the railroad cultivated their interest, even giving engine crews permission to blacken the smoke for a photographer (though they’d better clean it up darn quick when the shot was taken!).
Roanoke even designed ultra-modern servicing facilities called “Lubritoriums” where ready locos would be fueled, inspected, lubed, and quick-serviced to get them back on line in record time. Did other railroads of the day know what N&W was doing down there? You’d better believe it. They were the darlings of the railroad press of that era. It was said they used their four Lubritoriums to achieve availability figures that challenged diesels!
Some of the letters I received complicated my statement about a Y6b outpulling a Big Boy. I meant it literally, as in a tractor-pull setting with them coupled to each other and pulling in opposite directions. I doubt that the couplers then or now could stand up to such a thing, but if some sort of interconnection could be designed, I’m absolutely certain the Y6b would have walked away with the Big Boy! Despite giving up 100,000 pounds to the Western Wrangler, the Mighty Y was set up to be a digger, applying fantastic pull at slow speeds. In a drag race, of course, the Big Boy would have won hands down.
One other number is worthy of note: 191 Ys were constructed, beginning the count with the Y3 while the Big Boy only produced 25 copies. The Y3 has been modeled in several scales, and the Y6b has found reproductions in HO scale from plastic, brass, and now diecast. Modern model railroad locomotives are all remarkable products, but the marketing value reaches far beyond anything sales people can predict. The chart reproduced here only captures some of this, and I don’t think marketing surveys would have predicted the response.
As we check down the list on the chart, we see some targets of modeling opportunities, including C&O’s Alleghenies and Yellowstones, plus Southern Pacific’s Cab Forwards. N&W had 190 Z-class 2-6-6-2 types, and a model of them would be very interesting. Two of them went to live on the Rio Grande, offering another roadname. We’d like to see all of these as diecast delights. Behind every model is another fascinating story, and we want to tell it.