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

“The Southern Railway under the absolute monarchy of
steam was the most pervasively beautiful carrier I have ever
known,” wrote David P. Morgan, famed editor of Trains
magazine. The Southern embodied the romantic vision of the South. As
railway historian H. Stafford Bryant Jr. put it, “With the
Southern, it was always Garden Week in Virginia, April on the Habersham
Road, and the Ole Miss game at Tuscaloosa.” And the
locomotive that personified Southern style was the Ps-4 Pacific.

In truth, the Ps-4 was a virtual copy of the USRA’s
Heavy Pacific design, which drew heavily on the Pennsy K4s for
inspiration. But two sons of Virginia, Fairfax Harrison and W. Graham
Claytor Jr., made the Ps-4 a stunning corporate symbol recognized
worldwide as one of the most beautiful of all American steamers.

Born of a patrician Virginia family, Fairfax Harrison was a
graduate of Yale and Columbia, lawyer, historian, Latin scholar and
country gentlemen who ran the Southern from the teens through most of
the 1930s. On a 1925 trip to London, he was impressed by the green
livery and fine lining on many British steamers, and resolved to bring
that grace and beauty to his own road. Thus the next order of
Ps-4’s, delivered by Alco’s Richmond Locomotive
Works in 1926, arrived in Virgina green with gold lining and lettering.
The new look was so successful that it was soon applied to earlier
Ps-4’s and the entire passenger fleet. Because the Southern
allowed crews to stay with their “own” locomotive,
there was more than the usual incentive to keep the engines in
sparkling condition. As David Morgan noted, “No
green-and-gold Ps-4 was ever humbled by any Yankee engine she
encountered in Washington or Cincinnati, and her engineers, shopmen and
wipers knew it.”

Decades later, W. Graham Claytor Jr. — WWII
destroyer escort captain who rescued survivors of the U.S.S.
Indianapolis, Secretary of the Navy, president of the
Southern 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 and
donate it to the Smithsonian, where it resides today in green-and-gold
glory, a reminder to future generations of the mechanical beauty that
was the steam era. Claytor later described his youthful experience with
the Ps-4: “Our Washington Division line is mostly straight,
but is undulating throughout its length with the line rising and
falling about every 3 or 4 miles like a long ocean swell. In the old
days when I used to ride passenger trains to college behind Ps-4
locomotives, the standard operating procedure was to go 80-mph-plus
downhill, hit the bottom at maximum speed, and crest the next hill as
fast as possible, but seldom over 35 mph.”

New for 2021, we offer our Premier Ps-4 for the first time
with 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 left
Alco’s Schenectady works in 1924 and was later lettered for
the Southern’s all-Pullman, extra-fare Crescent
Limited service from Washington to Atlanta. No. 6476,
sporting an Elesco feedwater heater between bell and stack, belonged to
Southern subsidiary Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific,
route of The Queen and Crescent Limited between the
Cincinnati (the Queen City), and New Orleans (the Crescent City).