Collectors' Item 4
by Omer Lavallee
This month's subject is one
of three specially built locomotives provided for the Montreal-Ottawa
passenger service at the turn of the century. They were constructed at the DeLorimier Works
in Montreal to the design of A.W. Horsey, under the direction of H.H. Vaughan. Mr. Horsey
is shown standing beside No. 209, dwarfed by the engine's 84-inch driving
wheels, largest ever employed on a Canadian Pacific locomotive.
It was in 1898 that the Company completed the so-called
"Short Line" between Montreal and Ottawa via Vankleek Hill; this brought it
immediately into competition with the neighbouring and parallel Canada Atlantic Railway, an
aggressive system owned by J.R. Booth, the Ottawa lumber king, whose "Canada Atlantic
Express" linking Canada's metropolis and its capital, proudly claimed to
have
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been the first passenger train in this
country with vestibuled passenger cars and electric lighting.
Competition started in the autumn of 1899, after the Canada Atlantic had
obtained three locomotives from the Baldwin Locomotive Works which, essentially, were
duplicates of the CPR engines. By the summer of 1900, the CPR's fastest schedule was an
Ottawa-Montreal morning one which performed the 113 miles in two hours, 20
minutes, including four intermediate stops. Such a schedule would require the locomotive to
run daily at a speed well in excess of a mile a minute.
These 4-4-2 "Atlantic" type locomotives used the
Vauclain system of compound steam distribution, popular at the time. By this method, live
steam, exhausted from high-pressure cylinders, would be re-used in
a second set of low-pressure cylinders. Though fuel consumption diminished, the
high maintenance costs necessitated by the more complicated mechanism mitigated against the
system, and the locomotives were later changed, in 1910-12, to conventional
"simple" engines. They were scrapped in 1917.
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SPECIFICATIONS
Class
Numbers
Builder
Year
Serial Nos.
Cylinders (Dia x stroke)
Drivers (Dia)
Pressure (psi)
Weight (Lbs)
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Compound
ST4 / F1a
209-211
950-952
1000-1002
DeLorimier
1899
1925-1297
13&23 x 26
84
210
275,250
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Simple
F1b
950-952
2150-2152
DeLorimier
1899
1295-1297
20 x 26
84
200
276,000
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