Steam Locomotive Tenders, Big Boy vs DMIR Yellowstone

[Redore]

The wallpaper on my computer is a color picture of a Missabe Yellowstone near Proctor MN.  Looking at it the other day it dawned on me that the UP Big Boy and Challenger tenders looked almost the same.  I checked out some Big Boy pictures on Google Images and this proved true.

The Yellowstones were made by Baldwin and the Big Boys and Challengers were made by Alco at about the same time.  NYC had a locomotive with a similar tender.

Were the tenders made by the same company as a subcontractor for both or was this just a case of copying a good idea?

[nwo4rf]

They may look the same .but they are not. The UP tenders were about 3 ft longer and 2 ft higher than the Missabie. The NYC was the longest but the shortest in hight of them all. The only one that was like the UP in size was the NP tenders. 

[jrbernier]

  The DM&IR tenders were welded construction, and the UP tenders are riveted construction.

Jim

[Thomas 9011]

Many people do not know that some of the Yellowstones were leased by the D&RGW and ran over the Moffat route in Colorado. One of the Yellowstones was involved in a bad derailment that looked like a total loss but was repaired. Photos of the Yellowstones on the Moffat route are extremely rare and I have never seen any videos of them in action in Colorado.

[tomikawaTT]

I suspect that the centipede tender frame design was a General Steel Castings intellectual property, and that GSC would sell that style of tender bed to anyone who wanted to build a tender on top of it.  The tender design was the province of the locomotive builder, so specific details varied.  For example, the NYC tender (used with Niagaras and some Hudsons, was heavy on coal and light on water.  It was also fitted to scoop water at track speed.  I don't believe any of the Western roads had track pans.

There was a slightly larger 4-10-2 version proposed by Lima for their post-WWII double-Belpaire superpower 4-8-6 that was never built.  I recall a drawing in a long-ago Trains, but have never seen or heard of a model.

Chuck

[cefinkjr]

nwo4rf

They may look the same .but they are not. The UP tenders were about 3 ft longer and 2 ft higher than the Missabie. The NYC was the longest but the shortest in hight of them all. The only one that was like the UP in size was the NP tenders. 

There were also differences in the type of fuel carried (oil or coal) and in the lengths (and capacities, of course) of the fuel and water portions of the tender.  NYC Centipeded tenders, for example, carried much more coal than others and less water.  This allowed NYC Niagaras, and Hudsons to take advantage of track pans.  If the coal portion of their tenders had been smaller (like other roads'), they would still have had to stop for fuel and the pans would have been less useful.