THE TECHNICAL CHOICES THAT LED TO THE 141-R

After World War II, during which the network was destroyed, SNCF lacked locomotives, especially new ones. The company had a clear idea of what it needed, and that was a new locomotive that was powerful, robust and simple to build.

However, French industry was unable to build it because its factories had been destroyed. To ensure that it would stand up well in service, the components would have to be large enough to withstand the severe strain and stresses involved in operating a railway. The components and the maintenance auxiliaries were to be simple, easy to use and inexpensive.

Operating our famous 141-R will be very easy and will allow what is known as ‘banality’, i.e. operating a locomotive not by one dedicated permanent team but on a rotational basis with different teams taking turns day and night.  As a result, the locomotive, which will admittedly be American, will be completely French in its operation and maintenance. It is essential for French locomotive engineers to be able to drive on the left and walk on the left on the double-track lines.

Operators need two levels of water on the ‘front’ of the driver’s cabin instead of just one. They also need oil lubrication rather than grease (which has long been absent from the deposits). In addition, the depots need screw threads, spacers and firebox tie rods in metric sizes, or a firebox made of welded sheet steel. The French networks need a curved radius of 81 metres instead of the American minimum of 100 yards, and so on.  But in its construction and all of its features, the 141-R is very American, right down to its general appearance, its wheels, its chassis, its boiler, including and above all its comfortable and spacious driver’s cabin, its Nathan mechanical lubricators, its Worthington water pump or its Pyle-National turbo-dynamo as well as its Sure-Flo sand ejectors.

With its welded or riveted body resting directly on two American bogies with cast steel longitudinal beams and monobloc steel wheels, this tender is pure American design. While the water treatment system was the brainchild of Louis Armand, who was at the helm of the SNCF during those difficult years, everything else about the tender was purely American, including the Franklin towbar with its special buffers, the Okadee rubber water supply ball joints feeding a Worthington pump and the Barko steel ball joints for the stoker and heating pipes. Workers in the depot workshops found all these details with every 141-R returned to the depot, requiring different tools and ‘tricks of the trade’. The ‘R's really brought the depot workshops into the American era, with the same social impact as the cinema, electrical appliances, fast food, chewing gum, jazz and rock and roll that took over society and conquered young people.

In 1937, the powerful Chief Executive Officer of the great American network ‘Union Pacific’, a certain William Jeffers, had his personal car hooked onto the end of a passenger train. As railway workers everywhere know, a locomotive breakdown always happens on such a day, and that's exactly what happened... Jeffers was furious about the damage.

Shortly afterwards, the network was equipped with a new series of type 242 speed locomotives, the famous ‘FEF’, for ‘four-eight-four’ or 484 - as the Americans, like the British, count the wheels and not the axles... The 1920s and 1930s were a golden age in the USA, with more than 400,000 km of track, fast streamlined trains travelling at 160 km/h and offering incredible luxury, with luxury ocean liner cabins equipped with bathrooms, huge freight trains, high-performance locomotives, monumental marble stations and gigantic viaducts over inlets and rivers: This was the best network in the world.

With their 412-tonne weight, which is three or even four times that of the small European ‘Pacifics’, these locomotives were nonetheless capable of travelling at more than 170 km/h in normal service. They were simple, but powerful and reliable. Due to their high coal consumption, they were replaced by diesel locomotives at the end of the 1950s. Several have been preserved and can still be seen today and in working order.