Reading Railroad T-1 Class Steam Engine #2100

By Laurie

I have always been interested in railroads. One of my earliest railroad memories was my father taking me to a grade crossing about a mile from our house to watch the Reading Railroad’s streamlined Crusader train pass. At that time, the Crusader was a five-car stainless-steel streamlined train built by the nearby Budd Company of Philadelphia and pulled by a matching streamlined steam engine and tender. It ran from Reading Terminal in Philadelphia to Jersey City with a ferry connection to Manhattan. At that time there were no crossing lights or gates and there was a man in a little hut by the side of the road that held up a sign to stop automobiles as trains approached. He would stand in the middle of the road but he held his sign facing the trains and I always wondered why the trains didn’t stop for him.

When I was in high school, the Reading Railroad began a series of steam excursions called Iron Horse Rambles that ran over its rail system using four of their T-1 class engines (4-8-4¹ wheel configuration). The first one used #2124 and later ones also used #2100 and 2102. I rode on a number of Iron Horse Rambles and took photos of many others. I have found both 4×5 color transparencies and 4×5 black and white negatives in my storage boxes but haven’t come across any 35mm pictures yet. (At that time, the 35mm would likely have been Ektachrome slides.) This photo was taken in Jenkintown, PA and is from a scanned 4×5 transparency that was probably taken on May 12, 1963.

Five T-1s were held by the Reading for the Iron Horse Rambles: 2100, 2102, and 2124 were used to pull the excursions, 2101 was kept as a backup, and 2123 was used as a source of parts (and eventually scrapped). The Iron Horse Rambles lasted until 1964, after which, the three remaining T-1s were sold off (2124 had already been sold to Steamtown U.S.A. in Bellows Falls, Vermont in 1962).

The T-1 class was designed by a consortium of the Reading Company’s superintendent of motive power and rolling equipment and a team of engineers at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia. Initially intended for freight service The T-1 class were built between 1945 and 1947 at the Reading Company’s main locomotive shop in Reading, Pennsylvania, using the boiler, firebox, and several other components of existing I-10sa class 2-8-0s. The main reason for this was that the War Productions Board had outlawed the design of new locomotives, but allowed them to be rebuilt and modernized.

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1}Wheel configuration of railroad steam engines. See Wikipedia article.

More Iron Horse Ramble Photos

The last image, Iron Horse Ramble without the Iron Horse, the Iron Horse Ramble was run with diesel engines because of the concern for possible fires in the dry Pennsylvania forests caused by sparks from the engine.