In a horse-and-buggy age before automobiles and airplanes, traveling 25 miles an hour was really fast. Sixty miles an hour was hair-raising, and 100 miles an hour was pure science fiction.
At least until New York Central Railroad’s Engine 999, one of the most elegant machines ever built, went to work in May 1893. The steam-powered engine was the space shuttle of its time, the first machine built to carry human beings beyond the mystical 100 mile-an-hour speed plateau.
On Thursday, workers at the Museum of Science and Industry were busily buffing up the grand old locomotive, one of the museum’s most prized icons, in preparation for a 10 a.m. ceremony Friday.
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That’s when postal authorities and city officials will unveil, for the second time in less than a century, a stamp bearing the likeness of 999. Given the U.S. postal system’s normal parsimony in parceling out stamp fame to humans or human things, that is big time fame, indeed.
But that was the whole idea behind Engine 999, in the first place. It was built to be famous, a publicity stunt for the Columbian Exposition, the 1893 World’s Fair held in Chicago.
Steam railway engines in those days were at the pinnacle of breath-taking technological advances into the machine age. Virtually every railway company in the world was sending its most advanced locomotives to the Chicago fair as proof they were thoroughly up to pace about things mechanical.
George Daniels, a canny New York Central Railroad executive and early public relations genius, wanted his company to outshine all the others at the fair. So he commissioned William Buchanan, the premier locomotive designer of the day, to build an engine that could exceed 100 m.p.h.
Buchanan stuck to the basic design that had already made him famous, a 4-4-0 locomotive, denoting four small “leader” wheels in front, four big drive wheels to propel it, and no trailing wheels.
But he also modified the engine by giving it enoromous, 7-foot 2-inch high drive wheels, instead of the normal ones that stood only 5 feet, 10 inches.
“. . . Mr. Buchanan insisted that her (the 999’s) frame should be hand polished too,” said Charles Hogan shortly before his death in 1939. Hogan was the engineer who rode the locomotive to fame in 1893, becoming the Charles Lindbergh and John Glenn of his day.
“But when finished, by George, she was a beauty. Her frame gleamed like a black satin coat.
“Everything about her was designed for speed, with no pains spared for beauty. Bands, pipes and trimmings were highly polished; her brass shone like a mirror; her cab was beautifully painted and across the tender in gold leaf letters 2 1/2 inches high was written Empire State Express.”
Rolled out of the Schenectady (N.Y.) Locomotive Works early in 1893, it had a custom-made over-sized engineer’s cab and cowcatcher. Daniels gave the engine the 999 numerical designation for no other reason that that he liked the “ring” of it.
Hogan, who had helped oversee its construction, began taking 999 on trial runs. Early in May of that year, it was hooked up to one the premier passenger trains of the New York Central line, the Empire State Express, and hauling its cars from Syracuse to Buffalo.
Though some historians now dispute the speeds 999 reached, on May 9, 1893, New York Central claimed the train hit 102.8 m.p.h.
The next day, Daniels got the word out to newspaper reporters that 999 was doing something extraordinary. Several of the reporters on May 10 joined railway officials on the three-car train, armed with stopwatches.
On an especially flat 14-mile stretch west of Batavia, N.Y., the railroad had put up mile markers along the rail bed. Hogan let 999 loose as it approached the stretch while passengers marked off time with stopwatches as the train passed the markers.
“The clickety-click of the rails sounded like musketry,” wrote one reporter later, “and the telegraph poles along the track seemed like pickets in a fence.”
One mile passed in 42 seconds. The next in 41, 38 and 35, the final in 31.2 seconds. That was 112 1/2 m.p.h. Reports of achieving this unheard of speed raced around the world.
The presence of the reporters on the train achieved what Daniels had set out to do with 999. Reports of achieving this unheard of speed raced around the world.
When the locomotive pulled into Chicago and the World’s Fair a few days later, it was hailed as a wonder of the age. Instantaneously, it became the prototype for toy engines the world over.
To this day, children’s book illustrators called upon to show steam engines most often refer back to some variation of 999 and its 4-4-0 wheel configuration.
But, famous as it was, 999 wasn’t very practical. The railroad tried using it for a while on its passenger line, but the big drive wheels couldn’t start rolling without a push, resulting in passengers getting jerked and jolted violently.
A couple years after the Chicago fair, the railroad discarded the giant drive wheels on 999 with the standard, 70-inch ones. That made it too slow to keep up with more advanced passenger locomotives, so, ignominiously, 999 played out its career pulling local milk trains in rural New York.
That’s what it was doing in 1901, when the U.S. Post Office issued a 2-cent stamp honoring 999.
After the railroad retired the engine in 1923, it went around the country for various exhibitions to keep its fame alive. In 1962 the railroad donated 999 to the Museum of Science and Industry, a fitting resting place as the museum is housed in the only building remaining from the 1893 fair.
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Though the big drive wheels are long gone, the museum last year had the engine and its tender car cosmetically restored to resemble as closely as possible its appearance in its glory days. Moved indoors permanently, it will be one of the centerpieces of a major transportation exhibit opening at the museum this October.
But Friday morning 999 will be shining in all its glory as dignitaries reveal the commemorative stamp. It is one of a series of five stamps featuring it and four other classic 19th Century engines commemorating the golden age of steam locomotives.
Two stamps in 93 years is a pretty good indication of 999’s lasting fame. Elvis may not do as well as that.