Southern Railway Locomotive 1401
American Locomotive Company, Richmond Works · 1926
A gleaming green and gold steam locomotive as long as a house dominates the transportation hall, its driving wheels taller than a person, its cab high above your head. Number 1401 was built in 1926 for the Southern Railway by the American Locomotive Company in Richmond, Virginia, and hauled passenger trains between Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans for a quarter of a century. It is a Pacific type, with four small leading wheels, six great driving wheels and two trailing wheels, the classic express engine of the American railway's golden age.
The Southern painted its passenger locomotives in this Virginia green with gold lining and silver-grey smokebox, an unusually elegant scheme at a time when most American engines were plain black, and the museum has restored the livery exactly. Look at the size of the boiler, the brass bell, the headlamp, the cylinders that drove the wheels and the cab with its gauges and seats for the engineer and fireman. A platform lets you climb up beside the cab and look inside. The engine could run at more than a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour with a train of heavy steel cars behind it.
In April 1945 the 1401 was one of the locomotives that pulled the funeral train of President Franklin Roosevelt from Warm Springs, Georgia, toward Washington, which is one reason the railway saved it when steam ended in the early 1950s. It came to the Smithsonian in 1961 and, like the gunboat upstairs, was moved into the building before the walls were closed, so it can never leave. Since 2003 it has been the centrepiece of America on the Move, surrounded by a Chicago streetcar, a Ford Model T, a section of Route 66 and the story of how Americans have travelled.
Did You Know? The locomotive was rolled into the building before the walls were finished and is far too big ever to be removed.
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