CN LINES V12N3 - Canadian National Railways Historical Association

The Streamlined 6400’s
by Kevin J. Holland © 2004
Streamlined steam locomotives
proved to be both products and
victims of their time—harbingers
of the future and, at the same
time, a pruned branch on steam’s
evolutionary tree. Although not
the first streamlined steam
locomotives in North American
service, the CNR’s U-4 Northerns
nonetheless laid much groundwork
for the breed.
The emergence of industrial streamlining
during the early 1930s coincided, in
large measure, with an awakening desire
of North American railroads to replace
steam locomotives with more efficient,
more economical, and—particularly
where passenger trains were involved—
more attractive forms of motive power.
Streamlining became the next logical
step in the evolution of passenger train
Far from the limelight of the 1939 Royal Train and New York World’s Fair, CNR U-4-a No.
6400 passes Bayview Junction, Ontario, with westbound Train 101 on June 10, 1956.
—Dave Shaw (Railway Memories) Collection
motive power—nascent diesel-electric
technology decreed that many of these
locomotives happened to be steam.
The history of North American railroading
records that the steam locomotive,
as a dominant force deemed worthy
of continued development, was in decline
in the early 1930s as America’s railroads
embraced lightweight, streamlined passenger
trains and the sleek, colorful dieselelectric
locomotives built to pull them.
Times were changing, mechanically as
well as esthetically, with the streamlined
steam locomotive perhaps best regarded
not as a faddish aberration, but as an
inevitable step in the “natural” evolution
of the locomotive form, whether it be
electric, steam, or diesel. Some of the earliest
American streamlined steam locomotives—including
the first in service, New
York Central’s Commodore Vanderbilt—
were noted for their broad, sloping “shovel”
noses, an aerodynamic styling trait
shared with such internal-combustion
contemporaries as the Budd-built
Burlington Route Zephyrs and Boston &
Maine-Maine Central Flying Yankee, and
the Gulf, Mobile & Northern’s Rebel. The
pioneering EA-model passenger locomotive
built by Electro-Motive for the Baltimore
& Ohio—along with the smaller
TA’s built for the Rock Island—took the
shovel nose to the next evolutionary step,
creating the “covered wagon” cab and
nose architecture that would rule American
railroading for close to two decades.
Different packages, indeed, the Commodore
and the cab-unit, but clearly sharing
a common wrapping.
Styled by some of the leading industrial
designers of the day—and their
emulators—the “steamliners” were
caught in an unfortunate limbo, often
derided by steam stalwarts as an affront
to traditional tastes, yet just as readily
dismissed by proponents of the dawning
diesel age as tawdry dowagers out for one
last self-conscious fling.
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