Lima Hamilton Builders Number 8891

[trainmanken]

What locomotive was Lima-Hamilton builders number 8891? Did Lima Hamilton use a builders plate on their construction cranes that was similar to their locomotive plates? After looking at other plates from surviving locomotives, NKP 779 is number 9380, C&O 614 built 6/48 is 9306, I realize that this must have been from around 1946 or 1947. Sorry I do not have the plate to look at so I don't know if there is a date on it, or if it says Lima or Lima-Hamilton.

[hankadam]

U.S. WAR DEPARTMENT - French National Railways. Serial numbers 8867-9046. Order # 1191. These were
2-8-2's from August 1944 to September 1945. Source: Eric Hirsimaki's: LIMA, The History. L-H merger was 1947.
And yes, the LIMA diamond was used on all their apparatus.

[trainmanken]

Thanks for the reply. This question was asked by someone else at Railroadiana Online Q&A Board, and he wasn't getting an exact answer. www.railroadiana.org

[Allen Hazen]

So this was a "141 R": one of a class of over a thousand 282 locomotives ("141" if you count axles instead of wheels-- hence the class designation) built by North American builders at the end of WW II to help the French railways ("SNCF": acronym for the French for "National Railroad Company") recover from the war and occupation. The whole class was built in about a year: an impressive example of what American industry could do under wartime conditions.

There's a Wikipedia article (I found it by Googling "SNCF 141 R" which gives serial numbers for all of these locomotives built by various builders. There's a useful description of the locomotives and the circumstances of their building in Steinbrenner's "Alco: a centennial history."

Their design was a sort of compromise between French and American practice: French enough for the user to cope with, American enough for the builders to design and build fast: they were needed immediately. As a compromise design, they weren't as thermodynamically efficient as the later French steam locomotives, but they had American virtues of sturdiness and maintenability: 141 R were among the last steam locomotives to be used in regular service by SNCF, around the beginning of the 1970's. I don't know how many were preserved, but there's bound to be at least one in the French national railway museum (in Mulhouse, near Strasbourg).

[ghalehame]

What does 141 R means ? I respect & trust american builders because they deserve it & anything build by them must be portable !