Alfred W. Bruce’s 1952 book describing developments in the steam locomotive in North America during the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century is an interesting read, even if rather stilted in writing style by today’s standards and also reflecting the prejudices of the time it was written.
One peculiarity is that he abbreviates the usual Whyte locomotive wheel configuration system e.g. 2-8-0, 4-6-4, 2-6-6-2 etc, by eliminating the hyphens e.g. 280, 464, 2662 etc. This makes for confusion at times when interpersed with other numerical data. Was this peculiarity due to his editors or was this a common practice by some? Bruce was a VP Engineering and a director of steam locomotive engineering at American Locomotive Company.
I have copies of the Alco builder’s lists (I think they are photocopies of manual transcriptions) which show as a description wheel arrangements without hyphens, 280-S-160 for the USATC 2-8-0s for example. Since the hyphen separated the “S” for superheater and the 160 indicating 160 000 lbs loco weight from the wheel arrangement, it was logical to delete them from within the wheel arrangement.
This practice may have been more widespread within Alco, and Bruce may have just continued this in his book. I remember being surprised when I first saw Bruce’s book by the usage, but not much information was lost by deleting the hyphens.
I was brought up with the British use of “+” for articulation, so a Mallet was 2-6+6-2 (for example) so the straight Whyte system seemed strange to me anyway.
But the simplified system without hyphens was used within Alco.
I remember when David P. Morgan had declared the use of the plus sign as official Trains policy, which stirred up much controversy. I don’t recall when his declaration was overturned, however.