Vauclain, Samuel Matthews

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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b. 18 May 1856 Philadelphia, USA

d. 4 February 1940 Rosemont, Pennsylvania, USA

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American locomotive builder, inventor of the Vauclain compound system.

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Vauclain entered the service of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1872 as an apprentice in Altoona workshops and moved to the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1883. He remained with the latter for fifty-seven years, becoming President in 1919 and Chairman of the Board in 1929.

The first locomotive to his pattern of compound was built in 1889. There were four cylinders: on each side of the locomotive a high-pressure cylinder and a low-pressure cylinder were positioned one above the other, their pistons driving a common cross-head. They shared, also, a common piston valve. Large two-cylinder compound locomotives had been found to suffer from uneven distribution of power between the two sides of the locomotive: Vauclain's system overcame this problem while retaining the accessibility of a locomotive with two outside cylinders. It was used extensively in the USA and other parts of the world, but not in Britain. Among many other developments, in 1897 Vauclain was responsible for the construction of the first locomotives of the 2–8–2 wheel arrangement.

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Bibliography

1930, Steaming Up (autobiography).

Further Reading

Obituary, 1941, Transactions of the Newcomen Society 20:180.

J.T.van Reimsdijk, 1970, The compound locomotive. Part 1:1876 to 1901', Transactions of the Newcomen Society 43:9 (describes Vauclain's system of compounding).

See also: Baldwin, Matthias William; Mallet, Jules Théodore Anatole

PJGR