N&W Steam Development - Trains Magazine

Firelock76

On the other hand, the last battle of the Civil War WAS won by the South, but the Southern general's name was Margaret Mitchell!

Would have been nice if that HAD been the last battle, but (as in the original 'unpleasantness') there had to be yet another one  raised in South Carolina, famed land of the mouth passing checks a sensible brain wouldn't honor, firing off a new salvo in 1991, and then another English actress pretending to be Southern, and... well, down goes the Cause again.  ;-}

I'm not altogether sure that the test results showed a 'resounding' supremacy, either -- according to Ed King, the performance reports were more of a draw (there then being no particular economic 'advantage' on N&W at the time for reduced maintenance cost, better ability to work across multiple divisions without engine change, higher road availability, etc. which were seen as critical 'drivers' of diesel acceptance elsewhere in first-generation dieselization).

Something parallel that might be an interesting topic in this thread:  By 1951, N&W had essentially accepted that any more modern steam was going to be turbine-electric, but had rejected either the mechanical or the Bowes-drive versions of the PRR V1 turbine (going instead to individual axle-hung motors on all axles of the V1's somewhat peculiar chassis}.  What N&W and BLH actually built used, as we know, a different running-gear arrangement -- but a VERY prominent cause of the failure of the TE-1 was how cooked those traction motors became in service (and I think it takes a heap of cookin' to ruin Westinghouse hexapole motors...)   Meanwhile, the TE-1 had been advertised as being 'almost' fast enough to replace an A, but turned out (surprise, surprise, at least to some people at N&W) not to be able to deliver that speed, and for all its advantages, mechanical and thermodynamic, it wound up not being much superior to a booster-equipped Y-class (which in Newton's account always seemed to be stepping in to rescue poor Jawn  ;-} ).

And, perhaps significantly, costs and such had reached a point by the time of the turbine and traction-motor failures that the logical response was dieselization... in large part with improved designs.  Even to the extent of replacing the class Js with... well, even with fancy metalflake paint, I can't quite bring myself to say it.  (And this AFTER leasing the E units, so they did in fact go in with their eyes open...)