Norris Locomotive Works
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The Norris Locomotive Works was a steam locomotive manufacturing company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that produced about a thousand engines between 1836 and 1860. It was the dominant American locomotive producer during most of that period, and was even selling its popular 4-2-0 locomotives to European railways — those of England, France, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Belgium, Italy and Saxony — in the early 1840s.
The company was started by William Norris (1802–1867) and Col. Stephen H. Long (1784–1864). The two men had experimented in locomotive building for years and as early as 1829 had designed a locomotive to burn anthracite coal. Norris and Long also built an engine called the Black Hawk, which performed with partial success on the Boston and Providence Railroad, and the Columbia Railroad in the early 1830s. Long, a famed engineer, explorer and military officer, later left the firm and William was joined by his brother Septimus Norris, who patented several locomotive-related inventions.
On July 10, 1836, the Norris Locomotive Works ran a test of a 4-2-0 locomotive on the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad's Belmont Plane, which ran from the Schuylkill River for 2,805 feet, rising one foot in 15 for a total of 187 feet. The 14,400 pound locomotive, named George Washington, hauled a load of 19,200 pounds (including 24 people riding on tender and one freight car) up the grade at 15 miles per hour. This engine, the first to ascend a hill by its own power, proved that steam locomotives could climb an ascending grade. So remarkable was this accomplishment that reports in engineering journals emphatically doubted its occurrence. A second, more formal trial with an even greater load proved the engine's capabilities on July 19, 1836.
Norris built the Lafayette for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad the following year. This 4-2-0 engine was the first locomotive to feature a leading truck and may have been the first standardized production model locomotive. Innovations included the positioning of cylinders ahead of the smokebox and the four-wheel swiveling pilot truck. The Lafayette established the configuration steam locomotives would follow until the end of the steam era.
In 1847, the Norris Works built the first ten-wheel locomotive in America: the 4-6-0 Chesapeake. Operated by the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, it weighed 22 tons with 14½ by 22 inch cylinders and driving wheels 46 inches in diameter. Some authorities attribute the design to Septimus Norris, but in a paper written in 1885, George E. Sellers attributes the design to John Brandt.
The 1,100 workers of the Norris Locomotive Works produced a hundred locomotives in 1853. The firm's huge factory was located at 17th and Hamilton Streets, although there were other plants in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Schenectady, New York. The Norris Works was the largest manufacturer of railroad locomotives in the United States until it was surpassed in the 1860s by the Baldwin Locomotive Works, also of Philadelphia. Baldwin acquired the adjacent Norris property in Philadelphia in 1873.
