Was there ever such a locomotive ?? Has any one ever seen one or heard of such a thing ? It seems that I recall it being mentioned in an article I’ve read recently
Thanks to anyone who knows about this, I’d love to get my curiosity satisfied… Thanks…
My email is pobox119@prodigy.net
Hello Gregg
Thanks for a reply… I thought it may be a Jestful idea of some sort… Do you know if there is a picture of the o-2-o critter any where?? I’m interested in unique things about trains…
How might one contact Jim Fitzgerld at NTr5ak??
Thanks Robert K
I can’t imagine how an 0-2-0 would stay balanced.
What you might have seen is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a human being. Model railroaders in particular employ 0-2-0’s in rerailing and “pusher service” for stalled trains.
Hi there
I wonder if by chance you didn’t stumble across the French way of describing steam locos. Contrary to the Whyte system which counts the number of wheels, the French system counts the number of AXLES. So a Consolidation (2-8-0) in France would become a 1-4-0… A 0-2-0 means thet the engine is a 0-4-0 in American terms.
I think Nicholas is correct. It would be nearly impossible for there to be a locomotive with only two wheels. It would twist and turn and fall of about every three feet. Toung and pin wouldn’t work either if you think about it long enough. If slack let off it would pu***he tender and Jack Knife the whole locomotive assembly.
The “0-2-0” you probably heard about was built as a joke in N scale by Jim Fitzgerald of Ntrak. It has a single pair of boxpok drivers, two walking beams, a European style cab, and a four wheel tender. It was actually driven by a car coupled to the tender. It was a practical impossibliity that was simply used to make people wonder what they were seeing. I’ve heard of human intervention with model trains as the “0-5-0 switcher” as in the number of fingers in your hand!
Robert, the locomotive?? appears on Page 38 of the 1992 edition of “The N Scale Steam Locomotive Information Book” published by Ntrak. It first operated in 1973 on “the Random Route”, a railroad on which the train ran on a different route every time it came to a switch, so the whole thing was an exercise in whimsy.
The closest you can get in prototype is the Mount Washington Cog Railway locomotives which are 0-2-2-0 configuration.
There may actually have been an 0-2-0 locomotive - if you are willing to include monorail engines in your definition. I went hunting through my “6th Edition of the Guiness Book of Railway Facts and Feats” and came up with the following:
- The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway (in County Kerry, Ireland) was opened on 1 March 1888 and ran for 9 miles. The twin-boilered locomotives and cars straddled the rail which was supported on trestles. Loads had to be balanced. While it does not describe the wheel configuration of the engines, an accompanying photo shows that they may have been of an 0-2-0 design (or 0-1-0 or even 0-1-1-0).
- The Patiala State Monorail Trainway (owned by the Patiala Government, India) had a single rail which was laid along the edge of a road with balancing wheels running along the road. About 95% of the load was carried on the rail, and 5% on the sprung road wheels. In March 1909, four 0-3-0 steam locomotives were built for this monorail. One has been restored and operates at the Indian Railway Museum, New Delhi.
I don’t think this answers your question, but it does show that anything is possible.
An 0-2-0 is a Physical Impossibility. It’d be all over the place… However, if your’e interested in O-gauge 3-rail, a 1-2-0 or a 0-2-1 may be possible, with the “1” on the center rail
The Listowel & Ballybunion locos were generally regarded as being 0-3-0s, as were the PSMT locos as you say, although they have been described as ‘0-3-0(+1)’ for the outrigger wheel.
In fact there WAS an 0-2-0 that ran for a couple of years on the ‘Festival of Britain’ miniature railway at Battersea Gardens, London, in the early 50s. It was the creation of that great cartoonist, whose work is I think known in America, Roland Emmett. Needless to say, much of the loco weight was taken on the tender (which contained the petrol or diesel motor), which made the loco, in effect, a pony truck for the tender.
The whole railway was a total flight of fancy, and bore little resemblance to anything that ever steamed, but it ran, I seem to recall, from 1951 to 1954, and I have a hazy remembrance of seeing and travelling on it. I think it was of 15" gauge.
Reminded me of a photo in “The Twilight of World Steam” by Ziel & Eagleson. In the section on Thailand, where elephants were used to haul the felled trees from the local forests to sawmills, is a 1972-dated photo of that sort of operation, with a caption reading in part, “Steam engine fuel is … sometimes hauled to the sawmills by little 0-2-2-0T Pachyderms for cutting.”