GSBW K-1 Class

This is the current version of my 1910s anthracite-burning 2-6-4 design. It now features a new tender and outside ashpan in addition to its previously-updated features, which included a larger boiler and firebox and a new frame and cab. Official GSBW catalogue stats are as follows:


Class: K-1
Type: 2-6-4
Year: 1916
Fuel: Anthracite
Gauge: 4’8.5”
Driver diameter: 62”


This locomotive is inspired by the Reading Company’s 4-4-4s of 1914. Those locomotives, with their unusually-wide anthracite-burning fireboxes, sported four-wheel trailing trucks before four-wheel trailing trucks were officially “invented” by Lima for Superpower locomotives in 1924. The Reading’s inboard bearinged, center bolstered trucks mimicked four-wheel lead trucks in design and proved to be unstable; Reading soon replaced them with conventional 2-wheel trucks to create a class of conventional 4-4-2s.

No 2-6-4 tender engines were ever built or run in North America, and, indeed, a Superpower 2-6-4 would be an inherently ridiculous locomotive; but by crossing a typical 2-6-2 design with an anthracite firebox and the Reading’s experimental four-wheel truck, I was able to imagine a feasible, “what if,” pre-Superpower American 2-6-4 engine.



See alternate schemes and variations of this locomotive here:

Demonstrator: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/G…
SMPG: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/S…
Shamokin: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/S…
MRTC: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/M…
ER&W: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/E…
Minnesota and Western: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/M…
C&HR: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/C…
Georgia and Tennessee: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/G…
Eastern Pacific: atticus-w.deviantart.com/art/E…