Wow, neat. Wonder if they'll run on old oil, like the River Rambler.

All three TVRM locomotives are coal burners. SR 4501 has one of the largest hand-fired boilers in the country and is nowhere near as efficient as the museum's 'modern' ex-Army 610, built in 1952. During the tourist season 610 operates daily on the Missionary Ridge Local and several times a year on excursions into northwest Georgia.

4501 and ex Southern 630 have been out of service for many years and undergoing the painfully slow restoration afforded by a mostly volunteer workforce and a tight budget.

Wow. I'd love to ride on one of those. You're a veritable font of railroad knowledge, KR.

In 1991, at a banquet in Chattanooga celebrating 25 years of the Norfolk Southern Steam Program, Robert Claytor proudly stated that the successful rebuilds of their two modern Norfolk & Western locomotives would sustain the program through the next 25 years.

By the spring of 1994 both the Claytor brothers, Robert and Graham, had died and without their influence on management NS pulled the plug on steam in November of that year.

Crying railfans lined the tracks as N&W Class J #611 made a final trip back to Roanoke where she was built in 1950. It was as if we were at a funeral. Robert Claytor had called her the finest passenger locomotive ever built and indeed she was designated a National Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Robert Merriman and Bob Soule of TVRM had started it all in 1964, with the purchase of #4501 from the Kentucky & Tennessee Railroad in Stearns, Kentucky and their request to bring her home to Chattanooga on Southern Railways' old Rathole Division. The Southern's management later suggested that she should be repainted in Southern's passenger colors of Virginia green and gold.

There is a photo pool on Flickr displaying railfans' favorite scenes from the NS Steam Program.

You could do a steam engine "renewably" if you used wood like the original Chatt Choo Choo. These are excursion trains anyways right? Why not go small and quaint?

Wood does not provide the BTUs to get much power for a locomotive.

One reason 4501 was retired from the NS steam program was the fact that she could not pull trains large enough to satisfy the demand even in excursion service. Our fall trains to Summerville, Georgia, pulled by the relatively small #610, are sold out months in advance.

At the time N&W 1218 was the most powerful operating steam locomotive on the planet and 611 was the most powerful locomotive of its wheel arrangement ever built. She was designed to pull a 1000 ton train at 120 miles per hour.