Lenor Loree

[Engineer Spike]

Mr. Loree was president of my company, the D&H for many years. Under his leadership the D&H was one of the pioneers railroad technology. Welded rail, CTC, and many experimental steam locomotive designs were tried here.

[pjb]

No offense meant as Loree was a man of daunting personality, but he is associated with technological backwardness. His forte was business organization, and lots would question how forward looking he was there.
He was heavily influenced by the culture at the Pennsylvania R.R. where he worked many years. His son , who had the same name, was responsible for the high pressure compound locomotives.

Loree, senior that is, refused to have stokers installed on locomotives.
The result was that the helper mallets built for use as pushers oover Ararat
required two firemen, right from opening day. Whats more , the nature of the wootten boiler systemused to burn anthracite culm, that resulted in those large camelback consolidations (and later small aft cabin power) was particularly susceptible to damaging overdrafts caused by opening the firebox doors.

These locos had two doors in order to cover the wide firebox grates.
They also had small spaces between the grates because the fuel was of very small size. They required fire brick arches to increase the amount of time the burning gasses were held in the fire box to heat the very large
amount of water being heated there(as opposed to locos with smaller
fireboxes). The firetube section of the boilers was shorter than on
wagon tops or other boilers because the available heat was less, having
been extracted (hopefully ) in the fire box leg. There was a combination
economizing/draft controlling butterfly valve(s) on the petticoat
pipe/blast stack in order to reduce the velocity of the gas flow.
The small sized culm fuel had to be held in the firebox and burnt there
against the strong draft created by the loco exhaust. When hand firing the velocity increased with opening the doors. This was inimicable to working
these locos under load, over grades.

The result was relief fireman were required, because the physical
effort of trying to throw enough junk fuel into the firebox , and keeping
them hot was impossible. In time, better fuel and most of all - the
appearance of stokers, increased the efficiency of some of these
collosal 2-8-0s immensely. However, the Reading, notably, but also
L&HR and others, got there years before the D&H , because of Leonor
Loree Seniors ignorance.

You should read his books anyway, -because they give a perspective on
railroading of a guy running a railroad. However, he was mechaniically
backward. Nobody is perfect, right.
Good-Luck, Peter

[CREngineer]

Slight Correction:

Loree's Son's name was James Tabor Loree, more commonly known as the "Colonel"

[gravelyfan]

Not sure how this is related, but one of the main academic buildings on the Cook/Douglass campus at Rutgers, the State Univ. of NJ, is named for Leonor Loree. I had many classes there, and at the time wasn't enough of a student of railroad history to make the connection.

[ChiefTroll]

Leonor F. Loree was a Civil Engineering graduate of Rutgers, the State University. He has been castigated in popular literature for his refusal to install stokers, but his firemen turned into some of the best locomotive engineers in the business. They truly understood the need to conserve coal.

During the depression, which is really the period of the stoker issue, Loree did all he could to keep D&H employees on the payroll, including halving the work week. He figured it was better for all his people to be able to feed their families than for half of them to be totally out of work. Some of the track men who worked for me on the D&H in the 1960's remembered him very kindly for that policy. They worked in the winter, three days per week, digging in steel ties in frozen ground. But they had jobs, which was more than many could claim. Loree had signs posted in every office, shop and tool house on the D&H reading, "Don't Worry."

He was an independent thinker, an intelligent engineer, and as far from ignorant as any man could be.

His son, James Tabor Loree, achieved the rank of Colonel as Quartermaster General of the 27th Infantry Division in France during WW I. J.T. was General Manager of the D&H when he entered on active duty, and he returned to that position after the war. He was noted for his white glove inspections of the D&H. The tradition carried on long after his departure, not so much in the inspection practices but with the general housekeeping of the property.

[BaltOhio]

Loree seldom gets credit for this, but he really reached the high point of his career, and his accomplishments, as president of the B&O from 1901-04. At that time the PRR cointrolled the B&O, and installed Loree as its "puppet" president. Except that Loree was no puppet. The B&O at the time was a wreck. For most of the second half of the 19th century its management (principally John W. Garrett) had paid out unearned dividends and had virtually ignored the physical plant, which was loaded with curves, grades, and obsolete bridges and locomotives.

In the short time he was there, Loree thoroughly modernized the railroad, building numerous new cutoffs and realignments (e.g., the Old Main Line, the Patterson Creek Cutoff, several stretches in Ohio, etc.), installed new bidges, famously introduced the Mallet, and generally made the B&O what it is today. An amazing accomplishment in such a short time. He also planned the Magnolia Cutoff, which was built under Willard, and which Willard took credit for.

Loree's ambition was to be president of the PRR, but by legend he got into a fight with A. J. Cassatt over his overenthusiastic work on the B&O and was not invited back to Philadelphia after he resigned from the B&O. He originally considered the D&H a stopgap on his way to the PRR presidency, or one of the Harriman lines (he was close to E. H. Harriman), so it really turned out to be an anticlimax for him.