The Electric Locomotive That Was TOO GOOD | PRR FF1 Big Liz | History in the Dark

追加: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]This Pennsylvania Railroad electric locomotive was considered a failure because she was TOO GOOD.

[00:00:08]WHAT?

[00:00:18]THE Pennsylvania Railroad Class FF1 nicknamed Big Liz.

[00:00:24]Heck yeah.

[00:00:26]Was a single unique design viewed as a prototype and number 3931, but everyone just called her Big Liz or Liz or Liza or Elizabeth.

[00:00:38]All these things.

[00:00:41]She was originally constructed in 1917 due to the Pennsy's need for a well, very powerful locomotive. See, they were going through with their electrification of a significant portion of the trackage and one of their concerns was the Allegheny Mountains.

[00:01:00]Naturally, there are some grades in that area and they wanted to make sure that when they electrified those lines, they would have a type of locomotive that was strong enough to handle those. She was put together by Altoona Works, though they worked with Westinghouse on the electrical components. Under the white notation, she's technically a 2-6-6-2, but it doesn't really properly explain how she's laid out because she's not a steam engine.

[00:01:26]Under the AAR, she'd be a 1-C+C-1.

[00:01:30]She was over 76 ft long and over 14 ft high weighing just over 234 metric tons.

[00:01:39]Like most Pennsylvania Railroad electric locomotives, basically all the ones that didn't operate up towards the Manhattan and Long Island area, she used overhead catenary lines and was AC. The traction motors consisted of four Westinghouse Model 451 1,910 horsepower three-phase motors. And for a transmission, she utilized a rotary converter that supplied 25 hertz of three-phase alternating current fed to motors able to run at one of two different speeds.

[00:02:13]They were connected to her driving wheels through jack shafts and side rods, making her, yes, a very old style of electric locomotive, but that was a perfectly functional way to handle this.

[00:02:26]She was very, very large and built into half frames that were connected at the center. Each frame contained two of the AC induction motors, and her jack shafts can sometimes be mistaken in pictures for an additional fourth axle, but that's not That's not what those are.

[00:02:45]Those are the jack shafts. They They aren't touching the rails. They're just to drive the actual wheels. Due to the fact that this is an early electric locomotive, her motors were huge, and their combined output was 7,640 horsepower, though it was limited due to the converter. The converter could only handle, in the short term, 4,600 horsepower, and a continuous 4,000. So, their maximum output was never actually realized when it came to moving her around, but that wasn't really relevant because even still, her starting tractive effort was 140,000 pounds of force, and her continuous was 87,200 pounds of force, which was colossal by 1917 standards. There was an early design issue when it came to her motors, as they technically had no way to control their speed. So, they had to mess with the wiring of the motor poles, which allowed for two different settings. She was never very fast at all.

[00:03:51]Her two speed settings were 10.3 mph and 20.6 mph.

[00:03:57]That was it. But, remember she was meant for very heavy freight over mountainous terrain. A max of 20 mph was fine for slow freight, and with that amount of tractive effort, they expected her to do extremely well, and she did. She did astonishingly well, but she did just a little bit too well.

[00:04:20]See, remember how I said that starting tractive effort was colossal?

[00:04:26]I am not joking about this. That's insane by modern standards, let alone 1917.

[00:04:33]For a single locomotive, the standard rolling stock available at the time was not not prepared for Big Liz. She loved loved to break things.

[00:04:49]Every single time they tried to use her.

[00:04:52]They had to handle her so gingerly because she was very very capable easily of snapping the couplers.

[00:05:03]The second she pulled, it just broke.

[00:05:05]She was pulling too hard. They had built her too well. She was so powerful. And in order to get around this, they were like, "Okay. All right. All right. All right. We can't use her to pull. What about push? Put her in pushing service.

[00:05:18]She could be a helper. That'd be great idea." And yeah, that was a great idea, except she was still too strong because she pushed so hard, she could actually pop cars in the middle of the train out of alignment, off the tracks.

[00:05:34]Liz, no.

[00:05:38]She worked perfectly fine in terms of operation. She could start and stop and move, and there was no issues there.

[00:05:45]But, she was just too strong, too much of a good thing for the standards of the time. They just didn't have the rolling stock available in order to resist her unspeakable power.

[00:06:00]And thus, they never made any more of this particular design and used it pretty sparingly.

[00:06:07]It didn't help that from an economic perspective over the years, her specialized three-phase system was more costly to maintain compared to newer models. Those newer models also were powerful enough to deal with the mountains, but not so powerful that they would break everything while doing it.

[00:06:24]Plus, when the Great Depression happened, the Pennsy had to put a pause on their further electrification plans, meaning that even her limited use was even more limited, and she was placed in storage and sadly scrapped in 1940.

[00:06:40]It's a shame because in the technical sense, there really wasn't much wrong with her.

[00:06:45]Yeah, she was slow, but that could have been rectified with newer upgrades. But at the end of the day, she was just too powerful.

[00:06:54]She could not be contained.

[00:06:58]And as a result, she wasn't very helpful. You needed to be able to push or pull and do at least one of those two things without destroying what they were trying to move.

[00:07:12]And she couldn't manage that.

[00:07:14]She didn't know her own strength.

[00:07:17]It's kind of sad though. I'd love to see her in a museum.

[00:07:20]Till next time. This is Darkness and I bid you all a farewell.

[00:08:14]>> Hey.