How DEADLY Was Milwaukee's Hiawatha F7 ACTUALLY?

Описание: How DEADLY Was Milwaukee's Hiawatha F7 ACTUALLY?

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Milwaukee Road's Hiawatha trains ran at speeds most steam locomotives never touched. Named after Longfellow's poem about a Native American who could outrun his own arrow, these machines hit 100+ miles per hour in regular daily service between Chicago and Minneapolis during the 1930s and 40s.

May 15, 1935: Class A Atlantic #2 with a dynamometer car hits 112.5 mph between Milwaukee and New Lisbon, Wisconsin. Fourteen miles of straight track, eighty-four inch drivers spinning at hundreds of cycles per minute. Baron Gérard Vuillet later claims 125 mph on a cab-side timed run. January 1941, a Trains magazine reporter records 110 mph achieved twice during a single trip in a snowstorm.

The bigger F7 Hudsons built in 1937-38 ran the fastest scheduled steam service in the world: 78.3 miles between Portage and Sparta in 58 minutes, an 81 mph start-to-stop average. Daily. With paying passengers.

July 27, 1950: F7 locomotive #102 is running the North Woods Hiawatha eastbound toward Chicago when everything goes wrong. A connection link between the valve gear and Nathan lubricator fails. Both crossheads run dry. At somewhere between ninety and a hundred miles per hour, the right crosshead seizes solid. The side rods rip themselves apart, tearing through brake lines, forcing an emergency stop that takes 10,560 feet—exactly two miles.

Two civilians injured by flying debris. Nobody on the train killed. The locomotive destroyed beyond repair, retired the next month, scrapped by 1952.

Four Class A Atlantics, six F7 Hudsons. All ten scrapped by the early 1950s. None preserved. They proved you could run steam at 100+ mph daily, but the cost was burning through locomotives like consumables. When one finally failed at speed, only luck and skill kept it from being a massacre.

That's how deadly operating the Hiawatha actually was.