British Rail 4-6-2 ‘Dwight D. Eisenhower’ at Jersey City
A celebrity arrival on our shores is seen with Reading’s Wall Street May 12, 1964
In 1964, the Central of New Jersey was welcoming to photographers at the trackage beyond the platforms of its Jersey City station and ferry terminal. This facility was shared with parent Reading Co., and was also once served by Reading parent Baltimore & Ohio. Since coming to New York City in September 1962 I’d made photo trips across the Hudson on the CNJ ferries (which served both CNJ and Reading passengers, and in B&O days also carried B&O buses that served Manhattan). I’d been made welcome at the Communipaw engine terminal that served the station. Louis Marre phoned me to request that I go to Jersey City to take black-and-white photos of a streamlined British Railways 4-6-2 that had arrived in New York Harbor on May 11 and was said to be in the CNJ yard awaiting movement on its own wheels to Green Bay, Wis. So, I felt comfortable doing that and walking off the platform ends looking for it, just as I’d done in going to the engine terminal. It turned out to be not hard to find.
1 London & North Eastern class A-4 Pacific The Dwight D. Eisenhower was built in September 1937 at LNER’s Doncaster Works, one of 35 three-cylinder streamlined racers designed by Sir Nigel Gresley in 1935 and built until 1938. It was retired in 1963. First named Golden Shuttle, it was renamed in honor of the European Theater’s Supreme Allied Commander in September 1945. The specifications include three 18.5x26inch cylinders, 80-inch drivers, 250 pounds boiler pressure, 34,555 pounds tractive effort, and 41.25 square feet grate area. (British engines have relatively small grate area due to the high-BTU coal employed.) Because of the renaming of the engine, it held a special place in the attention of Harold E. Fuller, president of Green Bay Steel Tube Corp., a patron of the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay. By strong
personal effort, including visits to England, he obtained the locomotive as a gift from British Railways to the museum. BR also donated two passenger cars from a wartime special train in which Eisenhower had his sleeping quarters and met with staff and the officers of Allied nations. Unnamed donors paid for the ocean freight and rail freight costs. The engine was moved to Green Bay on its own wheels over five railroads. Due to the vacuum brake fitting of the engine, it had to be handled at slow speed as an unbraked vehicle. The engine’s assignment at King’s Cross for its London-Edinburgh operation on BR’s East Coast main line is indicated just above the buffer beam.
2 Reading train 621, ‘The Wall Street’ Departing Jersey City at 5:42 p.m. and scheduled to arrive at Reading Terminal in Philadelphia at 7:28 p.m., the train covered 90.3 miles in 106 minutes. That’s a 51.02 mph average with seven intermediate stops. Its companion train, The Crusader, left an hour earlier on an identical schedule. Both carried a surcharge over regular coach fare, but there were no first-class cars on either train.
3 EMD FP7 901 and sister No. 901 was built May 1950. All eight Reading FP7s had 89 mph gearing and 2,500 poundsper-hour capacity steam generator.
4 Eight-car passenger consist The train is made up of seven streamlined coaches from the 2000-2016 series built at Reading shops 1947-48 from earlier non-streamlined steel coaches and matching cafe car 2060. The original stainless steel Crusader cars were sold to Canadian National in November 1963, so, in 1964, the Crusader was also made up of coaches from the 2000-2016 series, one of which was converted to provide cafe car service. In 1967 RDC cars took over both trains.
5 Nine-track inbound signal bridge It was installed in 1915 and controlled by Tower A of Jersey City Terminal. The Aldene Plan of 1967 closed CNJ’s Jersey City Terminal as all passenger trains were diverted to Erie-Lackawanna’s Hoboken Terminal, to which Erie’s trains had already moved in 1956.
6 Kylchap double chimney This improvement, under a streamline housing, was installed on the A-4s as original equipment on the last four then retrofitted to the rest of the class beginning in 1956. The Eisenhower received its upgrade in August 1958.
7 Nameplate with red background The rest of the A-4s’ nameplates had a black background. This distinctive feature was lost when the engine made the trip back over the Atlantic to England in 2012 for a three-year loan and was repainted in what was otherwise a more authentic scheme than the one that had been applied earlier at Green Bay.
8 Three-cylinder arrangement The streamlining conceals the center cylinder. Although this is a Gresley engine, one would not see the “Gresley link” across the front of the cylinder saddle, familiar on U.S. three-cylinder locomotives, because the A-4s used a later Gresley design, the conjugated valve gear. The outside cylinders used conventional Walschaert valve gear.
9 Boiler changes British practice involved routine changing of boilers at major overhauls, exchanging from one engine to another in rotation; this engine had 11 such changes, the last in 1962 when it received the boiler of sister Bittern.
10 Spoked drivers It is notable that the A-4s used conventional spoked drivers rather than the disk or BoxPok drivers used for higher speed in the U.S.
11 Pedestal tender This features four axles in a rigid frame rather than trucks. This concept was also used in the U.S. on engines such as the New York Central J-3a “Super Hudsons.” The A-4 tenders were designed for non-stop running between London and Edinburgh, 400 miles. Engine crews changed en route using a passageway along the inside of the tank, and water was taken on the fly from track pans using a scoop. This arrangement that had been used on various lines in England since the 1860s, long before it was done on U.S. roads. Tender fuel capacity was just 8.95 U.S. tons but sufficed despite the horsepower demands of high speeds, due to the high-BTU coal and the relatively light trailing load of British passenger trains — about 840 U.S. tons compared with 1,200 tons for the 15-car 1938