catholic in application, suitable for passenger, freight, or switching duties; destined to conquer all the frontiers between the Mississippi and the Pacific as well as to power the original "railroad war." She had no live-steam injectors but instead took water from a pair of ram-type pumps which took their action from the crossheads and could therefore not supply the boiler unless the engine was moving (or, in an emergency, deliberately slipped). There wasn't a brake on the engine and the hand brake on the front tender truck must have served mainly for securing the locomotive during terminal layovers. To stop the General the engineer whistled "down brakes" to the crew behind and, when necessary, hauled

back on his manual or "Johnson bar" reverse lever.

Theoretically, an engine of the General's dimensions - 15 x 22-inch cylinders, 32,000 pounds on drivers, 140 pounds pressure, 60-inch drivers, 819.4 square feet of heating surface, and 12.4 square feet of grate area - should have been able to produce about 400 h.p. In view of the vagaries of wood fuel, a figure of 300 h.p. appears more realistic. It is recorded that in freight service the General burned a cord of wood (i.e., a stack 4 x 4 x 8 feet or 128 cubic feet in size) every 33 miles.

There was a substantial difference in appearance between the General of 1855 and the engine that bears her name today. As built, the 4-4-0 possessed an extremely long and pointed

pilot fashioned of horizontal bars truly a "cowcatcher"; two steam domes; and ankle rails (instead of running boards) extending back from the pilot beam on each side to the rear of the cab, almost at driver axle level. She was destined to survive her greatest day but not the war in this condition.

By purest coincidence the General escaped the popular anonymity which was the lot of most of the 25,000 or so American-type locomotives which, as surely as guns and plows, united the country. On April 12, 1862, the locomotive chanced to be assigned to the morning mixed from Atlanta to Chattanooga. In charge of Conductor William A. Fuller, the train was due out

¶Other men might have shared James J. Andrews' idea of penetrating far south of enemy lines with a small raiding party and sabotaging the vital rail supply line out of Atlanta, but who else could have conceived and executed the brilliant strategy of actually seizing an enemy train and us ing it as the vehicle of destruction? Who else could have shepherded 18 rank-and-file Union soldiers (who had no formal espionage training, not even Southern accents) into Marietta, Ga., and aboard a train without detection; or dared to steal the train as it stood alongside a Confederate camp of 3000 men; or bluffed his way through a meet at Kingston, Ga., with three other trains on the pretext that he was rushing ammunition to General Beauregard's forces at Corinth, Miss.?

¶One man of Andrews' makeup is usually sufficient to such an exploit but April 12, 1862, produced an equally remarkable force in the person of Conductor Fuller, for who else would have had the tenacity to give chase to a locomotive on foot - an act so ridiculous when undertaken as to cause ribald laughter in front of the Hotel Lacy at Big Shanty, but an act so sublime in its final consequence as to negate Andrews' mission?

And what of the perhaps imponder ifs of April 12, 1862: What would have happened if, as his engineer urged, Andrews had disabled the engine Yonah at Etowah instead of saying "It doesn't matter" and thus leaving Fuller a tool of pursuit . . . or if that century-ago Saturday had been dry instead of wet, thus allowing the raiders an excellent chance of burning their bridges behind them . . . and if, in the final analysis, Andrews had succeeded and Union soldiers had occupied Chattanooga April 13, then

Knoxville on the 14th, and gone on into Virginia for a rear assault upon the armies of Stonewall Jackson?

In the light of how the chase ended after 8 hours and 87 miles, the perplexing question in our time is why - instead of the Danforth, Cooke (1856) 4-4-0 Texas, which overhauled the raiders backing up - the General became the object of Southern veneration. Thanks to her, the continued separate existence of the Confederacy was at stake on April 12. William Pittenger, one of the raiders, expressed his comrades' feeling for the 4-4-0 when he wrote of the moment of abandoning her, "It was pitiful! The General had served us well ever since the morning hour in fearful speed and patient waiting, in exulting raptures and in almost despair. It was hard to abandon her now. She was substantially uninjured." It would appear that the North would have hailed the General as the engine that almost cut two years off the war; and that the South, then and later, would have shuddered at the mention of her name, praising instead the Texas. And strange it is, too, as Freeman Hubbard remarked in Railroad Avenue, that the General should eventually have been preserved in Chattanooga, the city she never attained on April 12, 1862, instead of in the basement of Atlanta's Cyclorama Building-which houses the Texas instead.

RETRIEVED by the Texas, the General was towed two miles back to Ringgold, where she spent the night near a depot that still stands. Next day, on the fateful 13th when the Union Army had hoped to enter Chattanooga because of Andrews, she was returned to Atlanta, where the 4-4-0 was thoroughly inspected and given light repairs. In July 1864 the Rogers engine

CANVAS shrouding is carefully draped over General and tender to conceal her from the scrutiny of the curious during flight.

was employed to move supplies to and wounded from the battle at Kennesaw Mountain. A few weeks later Sherman had a pincer grip on Atlanta and the siege was on. On August 31 the General was used in an unsuccessful attempt to move 81 cars of ammunition out of the city. On September 1 the Georgia Militia, in desperation, set the ammo train afire and disabled the General. When a photographer came upon what is believed to be her and made a glass plate now in the National Archives, the 4-4-0 had no headlight, sandbox, or cab; her

tank was bashed in and her balloon stack had been punctured by a shell. Her fighting days were over and she was on the wounded list.

Only fragmentary data on the 4-4-0 across the next two decades has filtered down to us today. Presumably she must have been repaired after the Atlanta holocaust, perhaps by the U. S. Military Railroad, which kept title to her until September 1865. It is known that on December 27, 1870, Georgia leased the W&A to the newly formed Western & Atlantic Railroad Company and that with the deal

went 45 engines, including the General then also numbered 39 and valued at $2000. One year later she was completely rebuilt at the W&A's Atlanta Shops and at that time acquired her contemporary appearance (i.e., wooden pilot, single steam dome, no ankle rails). Later in the 1870's No. 39 was converted from wood to coal fuel and exchanged her balloon stack for a diamond one. In 1882 her gauge was altered from 5 feet to 4 feet 9 inches, the new national standard; and perhaps simultaneously she acquired the number 3.

In March 1886 the Great Kennesaw Gazette, a railroad-owned magazine for customer consumption, reported the General-"one of "the old issue""

as still at work. In 1888 the locomotive, and captor Fuller, journeyed to Columbus, O., for a G.A.R. reunion and inspection by 10 of the 11 surviving raiders. In 1890 the W&A was acquired by lease from the state by the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis and included in the assets were 45 locomotives, among them the General; the notation beside No. 3 read "condemned-value $250."

In 1891 NC&StL's general passenger agent (and former Confederate colonel), W. L. Danley, received a call

from Chattanooga photographer and exhibitor E. Warren Clark. It seems that Clark had located No. 3 sitting in the weeds on a siding with other retired 4-4-0's at Vining's, Ga. (The Official Guide reveals that 10 daily passenger trains passed through Vining's in daylight hours in 1891, yet apparently no one other than Clark had noticed No. 3; perhaps the scrap line was not adjacent to the W&A main or the legend General on the cab side was too indistinct.) Between them, Danley and Clark managed to get the locomotive off the scrap list and restored to her "original" (i.e., 1871) appearance in the NC&StL's Nashville Shops, then placed on permanent exhibition under the trainshed of Chattanooga's venerable (1858) Union Station.

original cast and locale and the General was reflued and tested up to 50 mph for the occasion; the deal fell through when the producer wanted to switch the backdrop to California. Again, in 1926 Buster Keaton received tentative permission to steam up the 4-4-0 for a comedy re-enactment of April 12, 1862, but public reaction was SO violent that the NC&StL was obliged to withdraw its consent for the engine's use. (Keaton went ahead with the film, on an Oregon logging railroad.) When Walt Disney filmed his version of the Chase in 1955 B&O's William Mason took the General's role on grounds that the genuine article would have required too much money to place in operating condition.

If everyone theoretically knew of the General in our time, perhaps her resting place had become obscured with the years. At least, in late 1956 when photographer O. Winston Link chanced upon the General and received permission of the Chattanooga stationmaster to do some closeups, he worked in an empty trainshed Following publication of his work ("Salute to a General," March 1957 TRAINS), though, the railroad had to install a high wire fence around No. 3 to protect her from the curious.