Golden Spike

March 17, 2006 8:50 PM

In this famous railroad picture, why does the leftmost locomotive have a funnel shaped stack and the right side one have a straight pipe?

Anyone know the purpose of the inverted cone-shaped smokestack?

Also, does anyone know if this picture was taken from the south side of the junction or the north? Or east side/west side?

posted by kuujjuarapik to Travel & Transportation (10 answers total)

I think it's stylish more than anything. I think the one on the left is probably a 4-4-0 American, arguably the most distinctive of the early American locomotives. A number of them have been preserved and are still running; if an icon of the Age of Steam exists, that's it.

I'm not sure about the one on the right... if I could see the wheels I could do a better job of telling you what it was.

An equivalent modern question would be, "why does a Toyota Camry look different than a Ford Taurus?"
posted by Malor at 9:06 PM on March 17, 2006

Best answer: The picture is think the photo was looking north, if the modern reenactment is right. I don't know exactly why the stacks are shaped that way, but I do know that the train on the left is the Central Pacific Jupiter (modern replica) burned wood for fuel, and the Union Pacific No. 119 (replica) burned coal. I imagine it has something to do with that.
posted by jgee at 9:06 PM on March 17, 2006

Oops. Mangled the first sentence. I meant to say that I've seen the reenactments at the site, and if they are true to the original event (the track was torn up during WWII and later rebuilt for the monument), it is looking north.
posted by jgee at 9:13 PM on March 17, 2006

Best answer: I went and looked a little and found out there's a reason for the different stacks. The wide kind is used as a spark-arrester... it's an indication that the engine was wood-fired. The straight stack in the right one means that it was coal-fired.
posted by Malor at 9:14 PM on March 17, 2006

Here's a link (albeit to a model builders site) with a bit of an explanation as to how the spark arrestor worked.
posted by davey_darling at 9:26 PM on March 17, 2006

I went and looked a little and found out there's a reason for the different stacks. The wide kind is used as a spark-arrester... it's an indication that the engine was wood-fired.

Way to go Malor. Form follows function!
posted by Chuckles at 9:37 PM on March 17, 2006

I read the same thing in, believe it or not, a child's book on trains. British trains were coal-fired, east-coast American trains were coal fired, partly because coal was available and partly because the first few trains were imported from England (I know for a fact that the very first train in Canada, the Dorchester, was an English import). Coal was much harder to find out west though, while wood was plentiful, so western trains were predominantly wood-fired with correspondingly different stacks for stopping sparks.
posted by GuyZero at 10:51 PM on March 17, 2006

Guy, that also answers the north or south question indirectly... if wood-fired locomotives were out West, and coal-fired ones were in the East, then the picture was shot looking south to north.
posted by Malor at 3:14 AM on March 18, 2006

And, if I were taking a picture back then, I would want the sun to help with illumination, so I would take the picture from the south, which shadows and whatnot from this picture seem to bear out.
posted by etc. at 6:24 AM on March 18, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks!
posted by kuujjuarapik at 7:21 AM on March 18, 2006