The newspaper picture of said BP-20 should encourage those who are restoring ex-D&H PA #16 in Texas, which has similar carbody damage. Nothing is impossible.

Boy, those Pennsy folks sure did wreck a whole lot of engines in just a few short years....

Never seen that many photos of wrecked engines on other railroads...

I guess if you plan on wrecking lots of engines you need a whole lot of shop space to fix them all back up again...

"Those Pennsy folks sure knew everything, but nobody copied them" (Harold Crouch, NYCRR Mechanical Dept)

Cheers, Kevin

In fairness to the Pennsy folks my Pop (NYCRR Engineer) may have the record for "wrecking engines";

While working a switching job in Kenmore Yard (Buffalo/Tonawanda NY, General Motors Factory) he had a "bad day" (circa ~ 1970 when PC was broken everywhere you looked);

While spotting some cars a turnout guard rail lifted up off the totally rotten ties and snagged/ripped off the handrail along the steps. Handrails are FRA required safety appliances, loco was not FRA compliant, Out Of Service.

Got another loco from the engine house and a broken rail joint came up and snagged another safety device, loco OOS..

I think the engine house foreman's curse words still linger in the vapor around Kenmore Yard after my Pop radioed in that the THIRD loco assigned to their switching job that SHIFT also went OOS after another track defect damaged something..

Three loco's OOS in one shift, probably a record (nobody injured, no major damages).

Cheers, Kevin

Trains Magazine reported in the January 1954 issue that "shop crews took the 4-6-6-4 out of the baggage room in Washington in 40 chunks loaded on four gondolas". So it certainly gels with those pictures that she had to be basically scrapped to get her out of there, despite surviving the wreck relatively intact.

According to this particular news article, the initial decision was to scrap her. But when bids for a replacement came in at $750,000, the choice was made to rebuild her at a cost of $250,000 (Which easily explains why they didn't just write her off). So presumably a lot of the internal big ticket items like electrical gear were salvageable and able to be recycled in the new #4876.

I'm not sure about the $50,000 disparity between these two sources. Perhaps Altoona's internal cost for the rebuilding was approximately $200,000 and the $50,000 extra was what the Pennsy paid to outside supplier's for various components like the frame? Or maybe the $200,000 was what the project ended up costing, coming in well under the $250,000 price quoted in Trains that was perhaps an initial estimate.

This is an interesting reflection of PRR's business culture at the time, with Operations and Finance firmly established in their respective "silos"...

In this instance, a valuable asset was damaged to the extent of "near-total" destruction, and, I believe, the ranking Operations decision-maker "deemed" the asset MUST be re-incarnated. True to form, therefore, the asset WAS resurrected by all means at hand.

The accounting for the costs of actual work performed would have followed ANY COURSE required (including significant omissions), to achieve the pre-determined and mandated outcome.

The photo file is amazing to behold!! On reflection, I wonder if this is one for the Harvard Business School, as a case study in "forensic" accounting.

Nick Fry and I wrote the article about this wreck in Railroad History #216, the Spring-Summer 2017 issue. That is now out of print but R&LHS members can get the article or the whole issue through JSTOR. But here are some excerpts from the article to help doubters understand how the GG1 was salvaged and rebuilt.

"Washington Terminal wreckmaster and assistant master mechanic John F. Swafford used Terminal Company wrecking crane #500 and the Pennsylvania Railroad’s crane from Baltimore to drag and roll the locomotive so it was nearly level end to end and lying at an angle to the side below the level of the concourse floor. As he put it “The engine won’t take long. We’ll turn her over, drop her on her side and let ‘em build the temporary floor above her. Then we’ll cut her apart in sections and cart her away. It won’t interfere with the inaugural.” Then a temporary wooden floor covered by fast drying asphalt was built over the hole. A newsstand was moved onto this floor and wooden grills and temporary gates were painted to look like the metal ones for other gates. In 72 hours this had been done and most travelers didn’t know anything had happened.

By January 28th the last parts of the locomotive had been removed from the baggage room. You will read elsewhere that the locomotive was removed in three or some similar small number of pieces, some saying these were “hoisted” out of the basement. But this would have to been done before the temporary floor was built, or later while permanent repairs were made to the floor. In fact the locomotive was cut up in the baggage room and its parts taken out through the baggage passageways to a temporary ramp leading to the tracks, with what could be reused carefully salvaged by workers from the Wilmington Shops that maintained the Pennsylvania’s electric locomotives. It took five gondola cars to carry the parts to Altoona. Official PRR photos of the piles of parts at their Juniata Shops in Altoona show the true condition of the locomotive after the wreck, a long pile of cut up parts not even recognizable as being from a locomotive.

Looking back from today, the decision to repair number 4876 seems odd. But if we look at it while thinking of the reality facing the officials of the PRR at the time, it gives one a different picture. The Korean War was underway, keeping railroad passenger and freight traffic levels high. There was no interstate highway system as President Eisenhower had just been inaugurated and his administration started that project. Air travel was expensive and not being used by most of the population yet. Jet airliners were not used in the US until the late 1950s. The dieselization of the PRR was still under way and the builders were having trouble keeping up with filling locomotive orders in a timely manner. The GG1 was called “of the proper design and efficiently handles passenger service in electrified territory” in a January 30, 1953 memo from Assistant V.P. Operations and Chief of Motive Power, Howell T. Cover to V.P.- Operations, James P. Newell. When the last GG1 was built in 1943 the PRR had their fleet of this type at the size they considered that they needed at 139 units and wanted to keep it at that level. No other GG1 of its fleet of 139 had been retired up to this date and would not be until 1966. So based on all these factors and those described below they decided to repair number 4876. Why and how were found in PRR papers at the archives of the PRR Technical & Historical Society by Robert L. Johnson. These also showed that this decision was made at the highest level of PRR management.

On January 28, 1953 a memo from General Superintendent of Motive Power, Eastern Region, H. Harold Haupt to Mr. Cover, and also to H.L. Decker, Assistant Mechanical Engineer, Carleton K. Steins, Mechanical Engineer, and others, reported that a PRR mechanical engineer had examined the parts of the GG1 and recommended a “rebuilding because a great many of the expensive parts are reusable without repairs or without excessive repair cost. The good condition of these parts is due to the fact that the locomotive does not appear to have crashed down into the basement but rather eased down as the floor supports progressively failed, and the fact that the dismantling is being done under the direction of Wilmington Shop supervision who know the locomotive and are taking care to salvage everything possible.” The cost of rebuilding the locomotive was estimated at $138,270 compared to $425,000 to build a completely new one. Its depreciated value was given as $140,620 and its original cost in 1939 as $266,699. This memo was forwarded to Mr. Newell by Mr. Cover on January 30 with the recommendation that the GG1 be rebuilt as “it can be repaired for approximately one-third the cost of a new locomotive.” It should not be surprising that as the project continued these figures would change.

This memo continued to list the reusable parts and those needing to be replaced. The most expensive parts needed were new frame castings as the originals had been damaged in the wreck and also had to be cut up for removal. The cost for these had been estimated at $28,750. Another item from the archives reported that an order for new main frames had been placed with General Steel Castings on March 19, 1953 with delivery promised in about 60 days. Other parts needing to be replaced were the cab underframe, except for the reusable body bolsters, the entire cab superstructure, pantographs, and couplers.

The reusable parts included the traction motors, wheels, axles, quills, gears, pinions, most of the quill bearings, roller bearings and boxes, air brake equipment including brake cylinders, engine truck frames, both body bolsters, roof hatches, springs, pedestal caps, brake clogs, air reservoirs, compressors, sander valves and relays, sand boxes, side and end doors, main transformer, preventive coils, main switch group, batteries, traction motor blowers, controllers, jumper receptacles, most of the cab signal equipment, and the steam heat generator. The transformer was sent to Westinghouse, found to be in good condition, and returned to Wilmington where a transformer assembly was built up and then sent to Altoona. Wilmington also sent a train heating boiler with fittings and controls to Altoona late in April."

So, a new frame casting was made, and a new body built with all the salvaged items listed above installed in it. That is why there are no wheels in the photos. Any further questions?

Many thanks, Ron, for the perfect antidote to all the speculation - including mine!!

Paul.

Thus, the current PRR/ATK 4876 is not the same GG-1 that crashed, but a new unit reconstructed with old electrical components.

Wesley

I'm glad that the excerpts from our article were helpful. It is an amazing story.

In other words, pretty close to being George Washington's original cherry tree axe. Or, as one of my European colleagues once said, "Charlemagne's Original Battle Axe".

/s/ Larry
Lawrence G. Lovejoy, P.E.

I'm struck by the fact that they reused the wheels and axles !! Ever since I can remember, if any AMTRAK equipment went on the ground, we had to change out every wheelset that went off the railhead and touched planet earth, no matter how gently.

Things learned over 70+ years of experience.

Here a photo to illustrate what happened after the wreck in DC Union Station. You can see the GG1 has been pulled back from the waiting room doors and there is a cable running from its frame past the photographer going to a wrecker outside on the tracks. It is almost below the level of the concourse floor, and will be pulled further until it is below that level.

In this photo the temporary floor over the GG1 is nearly finished and soon it will be covered by an asphalt surface. The PRR sent an army of bridge and building teams to the station to work on this around the clock. The locomotive is entirely out of sight below this floor.
Cribbing holds up the edges of the concourse roof and vertical barricades at right screen the work from the public

Is there a record of the cars that were in the train? Did any of them survive?

Bob