All:
Was the PRR line from Baltimore to Harrisburg, via York, considered for electrification?
Also, I read that the PRR planned to electrify from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. That would have been quite a sight to see the electric motors in the mountains and around Horseshoe Curve.
Ed Burns
Happily retired NP-BN-BNSF from Minneapolis.
It depends on what you mean by considered. It was a single-track line occupied by at most ten passenger trains and four freight trains a day, with all through freight going via “the Port Road” with its minimal grades and eventual electrication, and this was the rout Amtrak picked. I doubt any real planing was done, as was done for west from Harrisburg.
The southern portion of the line is electrified, 750V DC, for Baltimore Light Rail how much of the rest remains is a question.
Historians will have to correct and elaborate. PRR electrification was completed to its final configuration during the depths of the depression. Some how federal funds provided the impetus for the completion. PRR then planned the extension to Pittsburg but the oncoming and entry into WW-2 put all those plans on hold.
After WW-2 PRR had to rebuild war weary track and buy new rolling stock equiipment. Then after the Korean war a recession seemed to kill project for good.
In hind sight it is probably good that Pittsburg electrification did not occurr. PRR did not determine if 25 Hz or 60 Hz would apply and 25 Kv was in the distant future. Dual frequency motors then might have been very expensive to build.
More important the CAT would have become Obsolete during the PC / CR era. Double stacks would not have cleared especially in tunnels, under highway bridges ( even today 2017 still would be a problem ) and signal bridges. CAT design would have been erected with limited or no ability to raise to DS clearances. The new CAT on the NEC replacements is constructed to raise it where it is not now DS clear. As well the Gallizon tunnels would have to have been lowere even more than they were for DSs.
PRR’s generating station was along the Susquehanna line, so that line was convenient for electrification and distribution.
You mean the Northern Central? No, that was a decidedly secondary operation, with lots of curves and frankly limited appeal.
A case can be made that electrification up to Harrisburg from the nation’s capital would ‘match’ electrification westward from Philadelphia, but comparatively little competitive traffic, either freight or passenger, took that route. There was far more ‘priority’ for capital in electrifying through Pittsburgh first, including the 9400-odd foot tunnel to bypass the worst grades. A proposal for electrification from around 1943 lists the likely locomotive configurations, and it is possible to back-translate from the indicated HP to the likely chassis configurations.
The ‘real’ reason why electrification didn’t go further has to do with dieselization. Dollar for dollar, diesels gave much of the advantage of electrification; where there was insufficient volume to make use of the advantages of external electrical supply, or when trains needed to run across nonelectrified divisions too, it seemed to make more sense to put the motive-power money in self-contained power instead of large capital projects with locomotives that couldn’t operate away from wire.
The Baltimore line thru York, Pa, shows as a double track line on a map of the electrified territory (includes non-electrified) dated 1946, that I photocopied out of a library book on the PRR that was supposedly authoritative. The “Port Road” electrified line was mostly single track south of the Atglen line connection.
On the Great Pennsylvania Railroad, everything east of Harrisburg to New York and Washington DC is electrified. West of Harrisburg to Chicago, standard diesels were used.
Not quite correct. Two examples: The line to Wilkes Barre was not electrified. The Schuylkill Valley line was only electrified to Norristown, beyond to Reading, Pottsville, etc was not electrified.
Without the federal guaranteed loan (repaid) in the 1930s, the PRR extension of electrification would not have happened. It shows how private-public partnerships can advance both concerns’ needs. A similar plan would be a wise use of infrastructure investment funding for the major (heavy traffic density) trunk lines throughout the US.
Well said
And, has been noted, the line from Baltimore to Harrisburg was not electrified.
So part of my answer is correct?
Only the Northeast Corridor was electrified then?
Harrisburg is not on the NE Corridor, but the line there was electrified.
DS4-4-1000 had the corrections - but you were mostly right.
Thanks tree68,
I’ve seen photo’s of the NE Corridor in the 70’s with trains running on bad track and run down buildings in the background. It seem PC decided the money used for the railroad would be directed elsewere.
There was quite a bit of additional trackage electrified other than what has become the “Corridor”, including the freight Low Grade line (Atglen & Susquehanna) one endpoint of which was mentioned in connection with the Columbia & Port Deposit, which connected the “Northeast Corridor” with Enola. I am still surprised that the railroad did not go on to electrify at least some part of the railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, as that was the section that would have returned the most from a good AC electrification, but between the Depression and WWII that didn’t happen, and dieselization had evolved sufficiently to be a “better answer” by the late '40s.
Not that PRR didn’t try electrification elsewhere: many of the Philadelphia suburban lines were electrified, and still are, and one of the ‘seashore’ lines from the Philadelphia area to Atlantic City was electrified as early as 1906. Much of the freight terminal yard trackage and some subsidiary lines in central New Jersey were also electrified, but perhaps that ‘counts’ as being part of the Corridor. What is a bit more surprising is how long it took to electrify the whole of the Coast line past Perth Amboy to Matawan and then Long Branch (of course that was done, when it happened, with a large amount of public money…)
Per a long ago conversation with a former Pennsy VP, the other reason that electrification to Pittsburgh didn’t happen after WWII was that some of its major coal shippers also sold it a lot of its coal. They did not want to loose the Pennsy as a good customer so made it know they could always ship on a different RR. Eventually, the Pennsy began to get serious about it again but then it became obvious steam was on its way out and that ended it. But the plan had always been to take it on to Pittsburgh and it would have been done if WWII hadn’t arrived. Note: he also told me that some of the coal they sold the PRR was pretty low grade but the brass said to use it anyway since they didn’t want to lose the overall business. And a favorite trick of some PRR coal suppliers was to load up a coal car 80% or so with “crap” (his wording) and then put some decent stuff on top to hide it.
Do a google search of PRR Electrification Map and you will find PRR maps of different years that show the Electrified lines in bold and the non electrified lines not bold. As said above there were a lot more lines than just the corridor that were electrified, but there were numerous lines that never saw a wire (or third rail).
One PRR electrified line that is often overlooked (and is west of Harrisburg) is the Dillsburg Branch. For a while this was electrified with 600 VDC trolley wire and a passenger car modified with trolley poles, motors and controls.
This helps explain some of the obvious smoke and soot problem with the T1, which was explicitly designed to use good-grade PRR ‘passenger gas coal’ and therefore had a decidedly small grate area both for its expected hp and its relatively high-performance front end.
Contemporary (1948-1950) publications made a great deal of the idea that locomotive coal should be washed and graded to about 2" size, and that doing so would save money, time, and suffering. I suspect that some part of the rapid demise of steam in the East came from reluctance to adopt this system.
Altoona Tribune, May 9, 1955
P.R.R. Studies Middle Division Electrification
President Symes Reveals Survey of Electric Power Plans
Possible extension of the P.R.R.'s electrified lines from their present terminus at Harrisburg westward to Altoona is being considered in a study now underway, James M. Symes, president, has announced. This phase of the P.R.R.'s electrification plans is part of “a comprehensive study of the future role of electric power in the operation of the P.R.R. (which) is now being undertaken jointly by the General Electric Co., the Westinghouse Electric Corp. and engineers of the road,” the president announced. “Gibbs and Hill, well-known New York consulting engineering firm, has been engaged by us to supervise and co-ordinate the study,” Mr. Symes said.
“The future of electric operation on our railroad, with 73 per cent of the service dieselized, poses important economic and operational problems which the survey is designed to answer. Among these,” Mr. Symes said, "are further possibilities in the
Perhaps close to smoking-gun proof that the electrification plan was finally killed not so much by early dieselization as second-generation dieselization, which came in just about the time of these plans. Anyone remember PRR testing 2400-hp six-motor Alcos on precisely the service Symes mentions, with positive results?
The ‘other half’ of this is the relative failure of postwar electrification options in locomotive design. I’d expect that the experimental GE and Westinghouse designs of the early Fifties would be the ‘new’ power bought to operate the new service … and those things weren’t “better enough” than second-generation diesel equivalents to justify the massive additional capital and maintenance costs, perhaps just as they weren’t in the mid-Seventies (with GM electrics) or the early '80s (with the Conrail dual-mode-lites)