N&W in 1910--Tests

[NW Mailing List]

Bluefield Daily Telegraph
November 4, 1910

IN CITY AND COALFIELD
------
Test Pulling Strength
    One of the most interesting tests which the Norfolk and Western has ever held will take place today on the Elkhorn mountain when experiments which will demonstrate the pulling strength of the American and Baldwin type of the Mallet engine, as well as that of the class M engines will be made.  Railroad men in general are very much interested in the tests which will be conducted under the supervision of H. W. Coddington, S. H. Barnhart and George Low, of Roanoke and J. Simpson, of Pennsylvania.  Road Foreman of Engines John Mastin, Trainmaster H. C. Weller and other officials of the road will also watch the experiments which it is claimed will actually predict the pulling strength of the mammoth Mallets and the big class M engines.
------
[H. W. Coddington retired as Test Engineer in the N&W Motive Power Department.  Not long after I went to work for the N&W in Roanoke I was asked by the Berea College Alumni Association to contact other alumni of Berea College living in the Roanoke area.  The retired and elderly Harry W. Coddington was one of them, and I visited him at his home in South Roanoke.  I wish now that I had known more then about his work so that I could have asked more questions and learned more about his experiences during his long career with the N&W.  In the 1980s I was told by a long-time representative of Edgewater Steel (a manufacture of wrought steel railroad wheels) that it was Harry Coddington who developed the present-day AAR wheel "finger" gauge that has been used by the thousands to take a reading of the amount of rim thickness metal that must be removed in the wheel shop to restore a full flange contour (the gauge also in capable of other measurements).]

Gordon Hamilton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/nw-mailing-list/attachments/20100423/6f97732a/attachment.htm>