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Discussion relating to the PRR, up to 1968. Visit the PRR Technical & Historical Society for more information.
 #1590077  by BR&P
 
Basement cleaning is in progress, and as I was digging out old National Geographic magazines to recycle, I came across this PRR ad from the September 1945 issue. Interesting to read the glowing dreams of the future, from our vantage point over 75 years later.
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 #1590085  by ExCon90
 
Coincidentally, a friend and I were just discussing the T1, another failed effort from the same period; both reflect the efforts of the PRR to improve the efficiency of the steam locomotive instead of asking themselves "what type of motive power is best suited to our needs?" That's the approach that EMC and others were taking, with better results.
 #1590091  by AllenHazen
 
Thanks for posting: it's a nice picture, and not from an angle I'm used to seeing the S-2 from.
The text is maybe a bit overstated: "first time" ignores a history of (non-U.S.) steam turbine locomotives going back, I think, to the 1920s.
The reference to battleships is understandable, but comparison shows the difference in scale between battleships and locomotives: the S-2 was basically a 6,000 hp locomotive, whereas the total installed turbine power (four turbines, one for each propellor) of an "Iowa" class battleship was 212,000 hp. ... Westinghouse was an established builder of marine turbines: two of the four Iowas had Westinghouse turbines (the other two had GE: do the names Westinghouse and GE call anything to mind in locomotive history?). So the S-2 was very much an effort to apply marine propulsive technology to a locomotive.
 #1590187  by TB Diamond
 
Lionel thought enough of the locomotive to produce a model of it L/1940s-E/1950s.
A boyhood friend had Lionel train set that featured one of the S-2 models.