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Why Chesapeake & Ohio had its own name for a 2-8-4
AAlthough generally accepted names for steam locomotive classes were never official, most railroads went with the flow and called 4-6-4s Hudsons or 4-8-4s Northerns, for instance. But there were outliers, among them Chesapeake & Ohio. The C&O established the pattern in 1935 when it received its first 4-8-4s and called them Greenbriers for the famous resort on its main line in West Virginia; a railroad headquartered in Richmond, Va., wasn’t about to use “Northerns.” And although it was late to the game with the popular dual-service 2-8-4 design — buying 40 in 1943 and designating them the K-4 class — the C&O decided against “Berkshires,” which reflected the wheel arrangement’s first use on the Boston & Albany in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. No, Berkshire wouldn’t do.
Instead, the C&O called its 2-8-4s the Kanawha (pronounced “Kuh-NAW”), named for the Kanawha River, a 97-mile tributary of the Ohio River that flows northwesterly from the West Virginia town of Gauley Bridge and meanders through the state’s most industrialized region. The C&O parallels the river much of its length. Although their careers barely lasted a decade, the Kanawhas were among the most versatile, reliable engines C&O ever fielded, similar to the 2-8-4s of the Erie, Pere Marquette, and Nickel Plate. C&O ended up buying 30 more Kanawhas in 1947, for a total of 70.
Ironically, the Kanawhas ended up briefly sharing the railroad with bona fide Berkshires when, in 1951 and ’52, C&O transferred 13 N-class 2-8-4s from its PM territory to West Virginia. PM had retired all its steam locomotives in Michigan by November 1951, but a handful survived a few more months, hauling trains on the Chesapeake District during a motive-power shortage. Two of the Berks were saved; more common today is the Kanawha, of which C&O donated or preserved a whopping dozen, including No. 2716, now being restored by the Kentucky Steam Heritage Corp. —