\"The Southern Railway under the absolute monarchy of steam was the most pervasively beautiful carrier I have ever known,\" wrote David P. Morgan, famed editor of Trainsmagazine. The Southern embodied the romantic vision of the South. As railway historian H. Stafford Bryant Jr. put it, \"With the Southern, it was always Garden Week in Virginia, April on the Habersham Road, and the Ole Miss game at Tuscaloosa.\" And the locomotive that personified Southern style was the Ps-4 Pacific.

In truth, the Ps-4 was a virtual copy of the USRA's Heavy Pacific design, which drew heavily on the Pennsy K4s for inspiration. But two sons of Virginia, Fairfax Harrison and W. Graham Claytor Jr., made the Ps-4 a stunning corporate symbol recognized worldwide as one of the most beautiful of all American steamers.

Born of a patrician Virginia family, Fairfax Harrison was a graduate of Yale and Columbia, lawyer, historian, Latin scholar and country gentlemen who ran the Southern from the teens through most of the 1930s. On a 1925 trip to London, he was impressed by the green livery and fine lining on many British steamers, and resolved to bring that grace and beauty to his own road. Thus the next order of Ps-4's, delivered by Alco's Richmond Locomotive Works in 1926, arrived in Virgina green with gold lining and lettering. The new look was so successful that it was soon applied to earlier Ps-4's and the entire passenger fleet. Because the Southern allowed crews to stay with their \"own\" locomotive, there was more than the usual incentive to keep the engines in sparkling condition. As David Morgan noted, \"No green-and-gold Ps-4 was ever humbled by any Yankee engine she encountered in Washington or Cincinnati, and her engineers, shopmen and wipers knew it.\"

Decades later, W. Graham Claytor Jr. - WWII destroyer escort captain who rescued survivors of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, Secretary of the Navy, president of the Southern from 1967-77 and later president of Amtrak - determined that the glory that was the Ps-4 would never be forgotten. While working as an outside legal counsel to the Southern in the 1950s, he convinced the railroad to pull one Ps-4 from the scrap line and donate it to the Smithsonian, where it resides today in green-and-gold glory, a reminder to future generations of the mechanical beauty that was the steam era. Claytor later described his youthful experience with the Ps-4: \"Our Washington Division line is mostly straight, but is undulating throughout its length with the line rising and falling about every 3 or 4 miles like a long ocean swell. In the old days when I used to ride passenger trains to college behind Ps-4 locomotives, the standard operating procedure was to go 80-mph-plus downhill, hit the bottom at maximum speed, and crest the next hill as fast as possible, but seldom over 35 mph.\"

New for 2017, we offer our Premier Ps-4 for the first time with the 8-wheel tender that trailed two-thirds of the 64 Ps-4 engines, in contrast to the more well-known 12-wheel tender. No. 1372 left Alco's Schenectady works in 1924 and was later lettered for the Southern's all-Pullman, extra-fare Crescent Limited service from Washington to Atlanta. No. 6476, sporting an Elesco feedwater heater between bell and stack, belonged to Southern subsidiary Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific, route of The Queen and Crescent Limitedbetween the Cincinnati (the Queen City), and New Orleans (the Crescent City).

 

Features:

 

Intricately Detailed, Die-Cast Boiler and Chassis

Intricately Detailed, Die-Cast Tender Body

Authentic Paint Scheme

Real Tender Coal Load

Die-Cast Locomotive Trucks

Handpainted Engineer and Fireman Figures

Metal Handrails, Whiste and Bell

Metal Wheels and Axles

Remote-Controlled Proto-Coupler

O Scale Kadee-Compatible Coupler Mounting Pads

Prototypical Rule 17 Lighting

Constant Voltage LED Headlight

Operating LED Firebox Glow

Operating LED Marker Lights

Operating LED Numberboard Lights

Lighted LED Cab Interior

Operating Tender LED Back-up Light

Powerful 7-Pole Precision Flywheel-Equipped Motor

Synchronized Puffing ProtoSmoke System

Locomotive Speed Control In Scale MPH Increments

Wireless Drawbar

1:48 Scale Dimensions

Onboard DCC/DCS Decoder

Proto-Sound 3.0 With The Digital Command System Featuring Quillable Whistle With Passenger Station Proto-Effects

Unit Measures: 23 7/8 x 2 7/16 x 3 7/8

Operates On O-36 Curves 

 

 

 Steam DCC Features:

 

F0 Head/Tail light

F1 Bell

F2 Horn

F3 Start-up/Shut-down

F4 PFA

F5 Lights (except head/tail)

F6 Master Volume

F7 Front Coupler

F8 Rear Coupler

F9 Forward Signal

F10 Reverse Signal

F11 Grade Crossing

F12 Smoke On/Off

F13 Smoke Volume

F14 Idle Sequence 3

F15 Idle Sequence 2

F16 Idle Sequence 1

F17 Extended Start-up

F18 Extended Shut-down

F19 Labor Chuff

F20 Drift Chuff

F21 One Shot Doppler

F22 Coupler Slack

F23 Coupler Close

F24 Single Horn Blast

F25 Engine Sounds

F26 Brake Sounds

F27 Cab Chatter

F28 Feature Reset