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A couple of points, here. First, my old neighbor Vernon Smith worked for Franklin Railway Supply Company which provided the poppet valves for the Pennsy T1, and he makes the very valid point that for a limited time - until diesels - the T1s did their job and took everything that came their way. He thinks the slipperiness was over-emphasized. He spent a lot of time with the T1s as a Franklin representative (he also worked on Burlington's poppet valve 4-8-4 and Santa Fe 3752). But one can say that the Duplex concept came along too late in steam's reign to be properly developed; I don't think they ever got the T1s weight distribution right and as noted above, two four-coupled units will be more slippery than one eight-coupled one. Another point is this: It might have been, and there is no documentation for this other than what happened on other railroads with the same situation, that the T1s were not operated properly because each one replaced two crews - the guys running the doubleheaded K4 Pacifics they replaced. If you read accounts of their operation, you will note that some crews didn't have the trouble with slipperiness that others did, because the engineers took the time and used the patience to handle the engine properly at low speed. But others did not. As far as the N&W was concerned, it carefully matched the engines it designed to the jobs it wanted done. It designed the J to be able to start 15 car trains at the foot of a crooked hill and accelerate out of the hole; to handle the same train at track speed up a mountain with more than 1.3% grades. It designed the A with a horsepower curve that would permit handling heavy trains on less graded territory at high speeds. It designed the Y-class to lug tonnage on crooked mountains, which it did. These were the things that kept N&W at or near the top of the heap in the early 1950s when it was still all steam in the categories of Gross Ton Miles per Train Hour and Gross Income carried over to net. These were the prizes, and N&W's management did not take its eye off them. When rising labor costs and inflation came into play in the mid-1950s, the railroad knew it was time to dieselize, and it did so. Also, there was no Government regulation limiting passenger train speed to 74MPH. There were the ICC limits imposed that limited passenger operation to 79 MPH on lines with automatic block signals in service, 99 MPH on lines with ABS and either Automatic Train Stop or Cab Signals. If you wanted to go faster, you had to have ABS, ATC and Cab Signals. I don't know the exact year they were imposed, but believe it to be a couple or three years on either side of 1948. Old Timer
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