Today I want to say a few words about a wonderful book I’ve admired and treasured for many years, Superpower, by David Weitzman (David R. Godine, Boston, 1977). It’s descriptively sub-titled, “The Making of a Steam Locomotive,” and that is very much what the book contains.
The dust jacket features an illustration that wraps all the way around the book, of the first “superpower” steam locomotive, Lima’s 2 -8-4 for the Boston and Maine, always called “A-1” at Lima. It’s an 11 x 13-inch book, horizontal format, hardbound, containing just 108 pages. The jacket foretells the illustration style of the book: just the subject of each image, no background, nothing more.
The story line is that of a young apprentice, just starting out at the Lima Locomotive Works, who is shown the various components for building the A-1. He even meets Will Woodard, the designer of the superpower concept. I will just show a few examples of the 35 drawings, which can only suggest the power of them in the book, as they often run across the gutter of this large-format book.
An early example is the cylinder castings, shown being examined before assembling the pair of them into the cylinder saddle. The right-hand cylinder is on the facing page, its edge just visible here.
Another interesting example is the foundry work for casting the frame halves. The partial image I show below is the sand casting mold, being prepared in the lower area for the molten steel to be poured into the mold, and the upper half of the mold above it. This is most but not all of this large drawing.
The last drawing I will show is the assembly of the boiler onto the frame and cylinder saddle, when the locomotive parts first begin to all come together.
What a book! I have been through it many times, and thoroughly enjoyed it every time. Of course, I’m a steam-era guy and all that, but the illustrations are so well done, and the processes so well shown, that I think anyone with an engineering bent of any kind would like it,
Tony Thompson
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