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The introduction of electric locomotives at the turn of the 20th century and later diesel-electric locomotives spelled the beginning of the end for steam locomotives, although that end was long in coming.[47] As diesel power, more especially with electric transmission, became more reliable in the 1930s it gained a foothold in North America.[48] The full changeover took place there during the 1950s. In continental Europe large-scale electrification had displaced steam power by the 1970s. Steam had in its favour familiar technology, adapted well to local facilities. It also consumed a wide variety of fuels; this led to its continued use in many countries to the end of the 20th century. Steam engines have considerably less thermal efficiency than modern diesels, requiring constant maintenance and labour to keep them operational.[49] Water is required at many points throughout a rail network and becomes a major problem in desert areas, as are found in some regions within the United States, Australia and South Africa. In other localities the local water is unsuitable. The reciprocating mechanism on the driving wheels of a two-cylinder single expansion steam locomotive tended to pound the rails (see "hammer blow"), thus requiring more maintenance. Raising steam from coal took a matter of hours which brought serious pollution problems. Coal-burning locomotives required fire cleaning and ash removal between turns of duty. This was all done in the open air by hand in deplorable working conditions. Diesel or electric locomotives, by comparison, drew benefit from new custom built servicing facilities. Finally, the smoke from steam locomotives was deemed objectionable; in fact, the first electric and diesel locomotives were developed to meet smoke abatement requirements,[50] although this did not take into account the high level of invisible pollution in diesel exhaust smoke, especially when idling. It should also be remembered that the power for electric trains is, for the most part, derived from steam generated in a power station—often fueled with coal. U.S. decline Northwestern Steel and Wire locomotive number 80, July 1964 Diesel locomotives began to appear in mainline service in the United States in the mid-1930s.[51] The diesel reduced maintenance costs dramatically, while increasing locomotive availability. On the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad the new units delivered over 350,000 miles (560,000 km) a year, compared with about 120,000–150,000 for a mainline steam locomotive.[21] World War II delayed dieselisation in the U.S., but the pace picked up in the 1950s.[citation needed] 1960 is normally considered the last year for regular Class 1 main line standard gauge steam operations in the United States, with operations on the Grand Trunk Western, Illinois Central, Norfolk and Western, and Duluth Missabe and Iron Range Railroads,[52] as well as Canadian Pacific operations in the state of Maine.[53] However, the Grand Trunk Western used some steam on regular passenger trains into 1961, the last occurring unannounced on trains 56 and 21 in the Detroit area on September 20, 1961 with 4-8-4 6323, one day before its flue time expired.[54] The last standard gauge regular freight service steam by a class 1 railroad was on the isolated Leadville branch of the Colorado and Southern (Burlington Lines) October 11, 1962 with 2-8-0 641.[55] Narrow gauge steam was used for freight service by the Denver and Rio Grande Western on the 250-mile (400 km) run from Alamosa, Colorado to Farmington, New Mexico via Durango until service ceased December 5, 1968.[55] The Union Pacific is the only Class I railroad in the U.S. to have never completely dieselized, at least nominally. It has always had at least one operational steam locomotive, Union Pacific 844, on its roster.[56] Some U.S. shortlines continued steam operations into the 1960s, and the Northwestern Steel and Wire mill in Sterling, Illinois, continued to operate steam locomotives until December 1980.[57] Two surviving sections of the Denver and Rio Grande Western's San Juan Extension, now operating separately as the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad and the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, continue to use steam locomotives and operate as tourist railroads. British decline British industrial steam in the 1970s: a Robert Stephenson & Hawthorn 0-4-0ST shunting coal wagons at Agecroft Power Station, Pendlebury, north of Manchester, in 1976 Trials of diesel locomotives and railcars began in Britain in the 1930s but made only limited progress. One problem was that British diesel locomotives were often seriously under-powered, compared with the steam locomotives against which they were competing. After 1945, problems associated with post-war reconstruction and the availability of cheap domestic-produced coal kept steam in widespread use throughout the two following decades. However the ready availability of cheap oil led to new dieselisation programmes from 1955 and these began to take full effect from around 1962. Towards the end of the steam era, steam motive power was allowed to fall into a dire state of repair. The last steam-hauled service trains on the British Railways network ran in 1968, but the use of steam locomotives in British industry continued into the 1980s.[58] In June 1975 there were still 41 locations where steam was in regular use, and many more where engines were held in reserve in case of diesel failures.[59] Gradually, the decline of the ironstone quarries, steel, coal mining and shipbuilding industries—and the plentiful supply of redundant British Rail diesel shunters as replacements—led to the disappearance of steam power for commercial uses.[58][59] Several hundred rebuilt and preserved steam locomotives are still used on preserved volunteer-run 'heritage' railway lines in the UK. A proportion of the locomotives are regularly used on the national rail network by private operators where they run special excursions and touring trains. A new steam locomotive, the LNER Peppercorn Class A1 60163 Tornado has been built (began service in 2009), and more are in the planning stage. Russia P36-0251 — last steam passenger locomotive built in Russia. Heritage run during Expo 1520 exhibition in Scherbinka, Moscow Oblast. In the USSR, although the first mainline diesel-electric locomotive was built in USSR in 1924, the last steam locomotive (model П36, serial number 251) was built in 1956; it is now in the Museum of Railway Machinery at former Warsaw Rail Terminal, Saint Petersburg. In the European part of the USSR, almost all steam locomotives were replaced by diesel and electric locomotives in the 1960s; in Siberia and Central Asia, state records verify that L-class 2-10-0s, and LV-class 2-10-2s were not retired until 1985. Until 1994, Russia had at least 1,000 steam locomotives stored in operable condition in case of "national emergencies".[60][61][62] South Africa In South Africa, the last new locomotives purchased were 2-6-2+2-6-2 Garratts from Hunslet Taylor for the 2-foot (610 mm) gauge lines in 1968.[63] Another class 25NC locomotive, No. 3454, nicknamed the "Blue Devil" because of its colour scheme, received modifications including a most obvious set of double side-by-side exhaust stacks. In southern Natal, two former South African Railway 2 ft (610 mm) gauge NGG16 Garratts operating on the privatised Port Shepstone and Alfred County Railway (ACR) received some L. D. Porta modifications in 1990 becoming a new NGG16A class.[64] By 1994 almost all commercial steam locomotives were put out of service, although many of them are preserved in museums or at railway stations for public viewing. Today only a few privately owned steam locomotives are still operating in South Africa, namely the ones being used by the 5-star luxury train Rovos Rail, and the tourist trains Outeniqua Tjoe Choo, Apple Express and (until 2008) Banana Express. For more details on this topic, see List of South African locomotive classes. China China continued to build mainline steam locomotives until late in the century, even building a few examples for American tourist operations. China was the last main-line user of steam locomotives, such use ending officially on the Ji-Tong line at the end of 2005. Some steam locomotives are still (2014) in use in industrial operations in China. Some coal and other mineral operations maintain an active roster of JS or SY steam locomotives bought secondhand from China Rail. The last steam locomotive built in China was 2-8-2 SY 1772, finished in 1999. As of 2011, at least six Chinese steam locomotives exist in the United States – 3 QJ's bought by RDC (Nos. 6988 and 7081 for IAIS and No. 7040 for R.J. Corman), a JS bought by the Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad, and two SYs. No. 142 (ex-#1647) is owned by the NYSW for tourist operations, re-painted and modified to represent a 1920s era U.S. locomotive; No. 58 is operated by the Valley Railroad and modified to represent New Haven Railroad number 3025. Germany After the Second World War, Germany was divided into the Federal Republic of Germany, with the Deutsche Bundesbahn (founded in 1949) as the new state-owned railway, and the German Democratic Republic, where railway service continued under the old pre-war name Deutsche Reichsbahn. For a short period after the war, both Bundesbahn (DB) and Reichsbahn (DR) still placed orders for new steam locomotives. They needed to renew the rolling stock, mostly with steam locomotives designed for accelerated passenger trains. Many of the existing predecessors of those types of steam locomotives in Germany had been lost in the battles or simply reached the end of their lifetime, e.g. the famous Prussian P 8. There was no need for new freight train engines, however, because thousands of the Classes 50 and 52 had been built during the Second World War. The VEB Lokomotivbau Karl Marx Babelsberg (LKM) built 1956 this Steam locomotive No. 991777-4. Today pulls the locomotive the Heritage railway by the Radebeul–Radeburg railway, also known as the Lößnitzgrundbahn (Lössnitzgrund Railway). The Radebeul-Radeburg railway runs between Radebeul East station and the small towns of Moritzburg and Radeburg north of Dresden. Because the concept of the so-called "Einheitslokomotiven", the still widely used standard locomotives from the 1920s and 1930s, was already outdated in the pre-war era, a whole new design for the new steam locomotives was developed by DB and DR, called "Neubaudampflokomotiven" (new build steam locomotives). In particular the steam locomotives made by the DB in West Germany, under the guidance of Friedrich Witte, respresented the latest evolution in steam locomotive construction, including all-welded frames, high performance boilers and roller bearings on all moving parts. But although these new DB classes (10, 23, 65, 66, 82) were said to be among the finest and best performing German steam locomotives ever built, none of those machines exceeded 25 years in service. The last one, 23 105 (still preserved), went into service in 1959. The DR in East Germany placed a similar procurement plan, but their engines were not as elaborate owing to a lack of money for new locomotives and political restrictions. The purchase of new-build steam locomotives by the DR ended in 1960. But later, during the early 1960s, the DR found a way to reconstruct older locomotives to conform with contemporary requirements. The high-speed locomotive 18 201 and the class 01.5 are some remarkable designs from that programme. About 1960, the Bundesbahn in West Germany decided to phase out all steam-hauled trains in ten years, but still had about 5,000 of them in running condition. Even though DB were very assertive in continuing the electrification on the main lines (in 1963 they reached 5000 km of electrified routes) and dieselisation with new developed stock, they did not reach that goal. But the steam services declined more and more. In 1972, the Hamburg and Frankfurt departments of the DB rail networks became the first ones that no longer operated steam locomotives in their areas. The remaining steam locomotives began to gather in rail yards like Rheine, Tübingen, Hof, Saarbrücken, Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck and some others, which soon became well known to rail enthusiasts. In 1975, DB's last steam express train took its final run on the Emsland-Line from Rheine to Norddeich in the upper north of Germany. Two years later, on 26 October 1977, the heavy freight engine 44 903 (computer-based new number 043 903-4) made her final run at the same railway yard. After this date, no regular steam service took place on the network of the DB until their privatisation in 1994. In East Germany, the Reichsbahn had to continue steam operation until 1988 on standard gauge because of many economic and political reasons, even though there had been strong efforts to phase out steam since the 1970s. The last locomotives in service where of the classes 50.35 and 52.80, which hauled goods trains on rural main and branch lines. Unlike with the DB, up to the very end there was never such a concentration of steam locomotives in just a few yards in the East, because throughout the DR network the infrastructure for steam locomotives remained intact until the end of the GDR in 1990. This was also the reason that there was never a real strict "final cut" at steam operations, so the DR used steam locomotives as well from time to time until they merged with the DB in 1994. But on their narrow-gauge lines, steam locomotives continued to be used on a daily year-round basis, mainly for tourist reasons. The largest of these is the Harzer Schmalspurbahn (Harz Narrow Gauge Railways) network in the Harz Mountains, but the lines in Saxony and on the coast of the Baltic Sea are also notable. Even though every former DR narrow gauge railway has undergone privatisation, the daily steam operations are still commonplace there. Japan Owing to the destruction of most of the nation's infrastructure during the Second World War and the cost of electrification and dieselisation, new steam locomotives were built in Japan until 1960. The number of Japanese steam locomotives reached a peak of 5,958 in 1946.[65] With the booming post-war Japanese economy, steam locomotives were gradually withdrawn from main line service beginning in the early 1960s, and were replaced with diesel and electric locomotives. They were relegated to branch line and sub-main line services for several more years until the late 1960s, when electrification/dieselisation began in earnest. From 1970 onwards, steam locomotion was abolished on the JNR: Shikoku (April 1970) Kanto area (Tokyo) (October 1970), Kinki (Osaka, Kyoto area) (September 1973) Chubu (Nagoya, Nagano area) (April 1974), Tohoku (November 1974), Chugoku (Yamaguchi area) (December 1974) Kyushu (January 1975) Hokkaido (March 1976) The last steam passenger train, pulled by a C57-class locomotive built in 1940, departed from Muroran railway station to Iwamizawa on 14 December 1975. It was then officially retired from service, dismantled and sent to the Tokyo Transportation Museum, where it was officially inaugurated as an exhibit on 14 May 1976. It was moved to the Saitama Railway Museum in early 2007. The last Japanese main line steam train, D51-241, a D51-class locomotive built in 1939, left Yubari railway station on 24 December 1975. That same day, all steam main line service ended. D51-241 was retired on 10 March 1976, and destroyed in a depot fire a month later, though a few parts were preserved. On 2 March 1976, the final steam locomotive still operating on the JNR, 9600-39679, a 9600-class locomotive built in 1920, made its final journey from Oiwake railway station, ending 104 years of steam locomotion in Japan.[66] South Korea The first steam locomotive in South Korea (Korea at the time) was the Moga (Mogul), which first ran on 9 September 1899 (Gyeong-In Line) 2-6-0, followed by Sata, Pureo, Ame, Sig, Mika (USRA Heavy Mikado), Pasi (USRA Light Pacific), Hyeogi (Narrow gauge), Class 901, Mateo, Sori and Tou. Used until 1967, the Moga is now in the Railroad Museum.[citation needed] Other countries Reading and Northern Railroad number 425 being readied in Pennsylvania, U.S.A., for the daily tourist train in 1993. In other countries, the dates for conversion from steam varied. On the contiguous North American standard gauge network including Canada, Mexico and the United States, standard gauge main line steam with 1946-built 4-8-4's handling freight between Mexico City and Irapuato lasted until 1968 (Eagleson, Ziel, 1973 The Twilight of World Steam). The Mexican Pacific, a standard gauge short line in the state of Sinaloa, was reported in August 1987 (World Steam Magazine #101) to still be using steam, with a roster of one 4-6-0, two 2-6-2's and one 2-8-2. By March 1973 in Australia, steam had vanished in all states. Diesel locomotives were more efficient and the demand for manual labour for service and repairs was less than steam. Cheap oil had cost advantages over coal. Steam traction in New Zealand ended in 1968 in the North Island when AB 832 (now stored at the Glenbrook Vintage Railway, Auckland, but owned by MOTAT) hauled a Farmer's 'Santa Special' from Frankton Junction to Claudelands. Due to the inability of the new DJ class diesel locomotives to provide in-train steam heating, steam operations continued using the J and JA class 4-8-2 tender locomotives on the overnight Christchurch-Invercargill expresses, Trains 189/190, until 1971. By this time sufficient FS steam-heating vans were available, thus allowing the last steam locomotives to be withdrawn. Two AB class 4-6-2 tender locomotives, AB 778 and AB 795, were retained at Lyttelton to steam-heat the coaches for the Boat Trains between Christchurch and Lyttelton until they were restored for the Kingston Flyer tourist train in 1972. In Finland, the first diesels were introduced in the mid-1950s and they superseded the steam locomotives during the early 1960s. The State Railways (VR) operated steam locomotives until 1975. In the Netherlands, the first electric trains made there appearance in 1908 from Rotterdam to The Hague. The first diesels were introduced in 1934. As electric and dieseltrains performed so well, the decline of steam started just after WW II and in 1958 steamtraction ended. In Poland, on non-electrified tracks steam locomotives were superseded almost entirely by diesels by the 1990s. A few steam locomotives, however, operate still from Wolsztyn. Although they are maintained operational rather as a means of preserving railway heritage and as a tourist attraction, they do haul regular scheduled trains (mostly to Poznań). Apart from that, numerous railway museums and heritage railways (mostly narrow gauge) own steam locomotives in working condition. In France, steam locomotives have not been used for commercial services since 24 September 1975.[67] In Bosnia and Herzegovina, some steam locomotives are still used for industrial purposes, for example at coal mineyard in Banovići[68] and ArcelorMittal factory in Zenica.[69] In India, steam locomotives were built as late as 1972 and in use until 2000; they were replaced by a combination of diesel and electric locomotives. A steam locomotive celebration run was organised between Thane and Mumbai to commemorate the 150th year of railways in India. In Sri Lanka, one steam locomotive is maintained for private service to power the Viceroy Special. B 5112 before being reactivated in Ambarawa Railway Museum, Indonesia Indonesia also has experience with steam locomotives since 1876. The last batch of E10 0-10-0 rack tank locomotives were purchased as late as 1967 (Kautzor, 2010) from Nippon Sharyo. The last locomotives – manufactured by Krupp, Germany, D 52 class, in 1954 – operated until 1994. In 1994 they were replaced by diesel locomotives. Indonesia also purchased the last batch of mallet locomotives from Nippon Sharyo, to be used in the Aceh Railway. In Sumatra Barat (West Sumatra) and Ambarawa we can find the rack railway track train (with maximum elevated 6% in mountainous area), now operated for tourism only. There are two museums, Taman Mini and Ambarawa (Ambarawa Railway Museum).[70] Pakistan still has a regular steam locomotive service; a line operates in the North-West Frontier Province and Sindh; It has been preserved as a "nostalgia" service for tourism in exotic locales,[71] indeed it is specifically advertised as being for "steam buffs".[71] |
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