O 4-6-2 PS-4 Pacific Steam Loco P&WV #200/3.0

“The Southern Railway under the absolute monarchy ofsteam was the most pervasively beautiful carrier I have everknown,” wrote David P. Morgan, famed editor of Trainsmagazine. The Southern embodied the romantic vision of the South. Asrailway historian H. Stafford Bryant Jr. put it, “With theSouthern, it was always Garden Week in Virginia, April on the HabershamRoad, and the Ole Miss game at Tuscaloosa.” And thelocomotive that personified Southern style was the Ps-4 Pacific.

In truth, the Ps-4 was a virtual copy of the USRA’sHeavy Pacific design, which drew heavily on the Pennsy K4s forinspiration. But two sons of Virginia, Fairfax Harrison and W. GrahamClaytor Jr., made the Ps-4 a stunning corporate symbol recognizedworldwide as one of the most beautiful of all American steamers.

Born of a patrician Virginia family, Fairfax Harrison was agraduate of Yale and Columbia, lawyer, historian, Latin scholar andcountry gentlemen who ran the Southern from the teens through most ofthe 1930s. On a 1925 trip to London, he was impressed by the greenlivery and fine lining on many British steamers, and resolved to bringthat grace and beauty to his own road. Thus the next order ofPs-4’s, delivered by Alco’s Richmond LocomotiveWorks in 1926, arrived in Virgina green with gold lining and lettering.The new look was so successful that it was soon applied to earlierPs-4’s and the entire passenger fleet. Because the Southernallowed crews to stay with their “own” locomotive,there was more than the usual incentive to keep the engines insparkling condition. As David Morgan noted, “Nogreen-and-gold Ps-4 was ever humbled by any Yankee engine sheencountered in Washington or Cincinnati, and her engineers, shopmen andwipers knew it.”

Decades later, W. Graham Claytor Jr. — WWIIdestroyer escort captain who rescued survivors of the U.S.S.Indianapolis, Secretary of the Navy, president of theSouthern from 1967-77 and later president of Amtrak —determined that the glory that was the Ps-4 would never be forgotten.While working as an outside legal counsel to the Southern in the 1950s,he convinced the railroad to pull one Ps-4 from the scrap line anddonate it to the Smithsonian, where it resides today in green-and-goldglory, a reminder to future generations of the mechanical beauty thatwas the steam era. Claytor later described his youthful experience withthe Ps-4: “Our Washington Division line is mostly straight,but is undulating throughout its length with the line rising andfalling about every 3 or 4 miles like a long ocean swell. In the olddays when I used to ride passenger trains to college behind Ps-4locomotives, the standard operating procedure was to go 80-mph-plusdownhill, hit the bottom at maximum speed, and crest the next hill asfast as possible, but seldom over 35 mph.”

New for 2021, we offer our Premier Ps-4 for the first timewith the 8-wheel tender that trailed two-thirds of the 64 Ps-4 engines,in contrast to the more well-known 12-wheel tender. No. 1372 leftAlco’s Schenectady works in 1924 and was later lettered forthe Southern’s all-Pullman, extra-fare CrescentLimited service from Washington to Atlanta. No. 6476,sporting an Elesco feedwater heater between bell and stack, belonged toSouthern subsidiary Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific,route of The Queen and Crescent Limited between theCincinnati (the Queen City), and New Orleans (the Crescent City).