No. 10484 Pennsylvania Railroad/Westinghouse 2-B + B-2 DD-1 Electric Outline Locomotive Set, heading up a Heavyweight Commuter Passenger Train

Pennsylvania Railroad

In order to move passenger trains in and out of New York City's Pennsylvania Station, the Pennsylvania Railroad needed electric locomotives, as steam engines were banned from operating anywhere in the city and its tunnels. The design result was the two-unit box cab 3160 horsepower 2-B + B-2 DD-1 electric locomotive, built by and for the Pennsylvania Railroad in the road's Juniata shops (Altoona, Pennsylvania).

Westinghouse designed the electric motors, powered by a live third rail. The Pennsylvania Railroad ordered 33 pairs of DD-1s in 1909, and as the first regular passenger train departed from Pennsylvania Station on November 27, 1910, the twin- unit DD-1 was at the head. Electrification originally was 13.4 miles through six tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers (1903-1910) at a cost of $113 million.

Steam power would replace the electrics outside of New York City, such as the speedy 4-4-2 "Atlantic"-type steam locomotive (see No. 10183). The DD-1s performed well for the Pennsylvania through the early 1930s, when the road decided to electrify its tracks to Washington and Philadelphia from New York City, and eventually in the later 1930s all the way west to Harrisburg, PA (see No. 10078), altogether 674 route miles of overhead catenary electrification, the most of any American railroad.

New locomotives were required for the expanded electrification, resulting in the L-5 (1-B - B-1, 1924, No. 10619), P-5a (2-C-2, 1931, No. 10226) and the famed GG-1 (2-C + C-2, 1935, No. 10078). The DD-1s were gradually taken out of service on the Pennsylvania in the early 1930s and transferred to subsidiary Long Island Railroad (see Nos. 10430 & 10463), where they served well until the early 1950s. There is one surviving pair of DD-1s, with Pennsylvania markings, Nos. 3936 and 3937, housed at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, PA. These units are the inspiration for the model train No. 10484, described in this history.

No. 10484 represents an accurate scale model of Pennsylvania Railroad's 2-B + B-2 DD-1 electric outline locomotive set, heading up the 5-car heavyweight commuter passenger train (No. 10485) as it would have been seen arriving at and leaving New York's Pennsylvania Station in the 1920s and early 1930s. The model train is in "0"gauge by MTH.

The commuter train represented by model train 10484/10485 would most likely be a nameless inter-city express to Philadelphia or Washington, with its four-door Railway Express Agency car. The improved 1920s all-steel cars seen on this model train were stronger and faster-running than their lesser turn-of-the century steel and wood counterparts. But the real star of this train is the venerable DD-1, the first of a long line of distinguished Pennsylvania Railroad electric locomotives, serving the railroad well throughout its history from 1910. The twin-unit DD-1 could easily pull a 14-car passenger consist weighing 1000 tons and could start an 850-ton train up a 1.93 percent tunnel grade, all with enviable quiet and smoothness.