One of the members of our Roanoke Chapter, National Railway Historical Society, Louis Newton, was a N&W Motive Power Department test engineer (not the locomotive engineer - observed the test instruments instead) on this locomotive. He gave a presentation on his experiences while riding with the Jawn Henry during those tests at one of our Chapter meetings. This presentation was done about ten years ago, so my memory may be faulty on some details.
The electrical control equipment, traction motors, and generators were built by Westinghouse. The boiler was a water tube boiler built by Babcox & Wilcox of Lynchburg, VA. This type of boiler was not common for steam locomotives, the fire tube - or flue type being the normal design.
The locomotive experienced a lot of problems with "flash over" in the generators and traction motors. The boiler also could get starved for steam. Apparantly the water tube boilers worked better for marine and stationary applications. On at least one occasion the steam pressure started dropping steadily while climbing a grade. The train would have stalled, had not the Y class assigned as a helper for that district "snuck up" behind the test train to give it a boost.
By the time all the bugs were worked out of the locomotive, N&W had decided to give up the steam/electric propulsion concept. No more examples were tried.
The locomotive was exceedingly powerful when everything was working right. It was sometimes too powerful for the draft gear of that time, and could yank couplers right out of the car frames if the train were too long. On one occasion when it was tried as a pusher, it crushed a caboose. The crew escaped without injury because they were instructed to ride on the caboose steps to observe the locomotive, and were able to jump to safety.
If this locomotive could have been tried about thirty years later, most of its bugs would have been eliminated in other applications. It was just too innovative for the technology of its time.
Yours,
David Meashey
