Once again, for this first posting in the month of August, I’m featuring a photograph from the 1986 calendar published by the Louisiana State Railroad Museum, it being for their month of August. The caption for the image follows below.

“March 1950, and Kansas City Southern’s class E-4 Consolidation, a 1913 graduate of Richmond, awaits her next assignment at Shreveport, Louisiana, the operating headquarters of the KCS Lines. (Photo from the collection of Harold K. Vollrath)”

The “1913 graduate of Richmond” referred to above is fully Alco-Richmond. By 1901 Richmond Locomotive Works had merged with seven other manufacturing companies to form the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). Locomotive production at Richmond ceased in September 1927.

There seems to be relatively few photographs of KCS locomotives, and information about them is scant (at least in my search). I was able to unearth only a bit of information about this burly 2-8-0. Built in 1913, she had 57″ drivers, and her boiler fed 175 psi steam to a pair of 24″ x 30″ cylinders. This produced 45,095 lbs of tractive effort. She underwent a re-building at some point, with the receipt of 63″ drivers, and her boiler pressure increased to 200 psi. Cylinder diameter was increased to 26″, and the tractive effort increased to 54,725 lbs. It appears she was one of eight class E-4s to be switched from coal burning to oil firing, that observation based on the Vanderbilt tender she tows. She was scrapped in 1952.

This information was uncovered at the website https://www.steamlocomotive.com, and also from handwritten notes of an unknown author, found in the collection of Lester L. Dickson at the Youngstown State University website https://digital.maag.ysu.edu/xmlui/handle/1989/43