Some locomotives get saved because they’re famous. Great Western No. 90 got saved because it still had work to do. This Decapod spent four decades hauling sugar beets across the Colorado plains, and when it finally retired from that job, it simply went and found another one. That kind of staying power is rare in the steam era, and it’s why I always point people to No. 90 when they ask me which engine on the roster best proves that a good steam locomotive never really runs out of usefulness.
No. 90 came out of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia in June 1924, built for the Great Western Railway of Colorado. That road wasn’t a mainline giant. It was a short-line, built to serve one industry: hauling sugar beets from the fields to the processing mills. Short lines like this one didn’t need speed. They needed brute pulling power to move heavy, low-value bulk freight over relatively short distances, day after day, season after season.
That’s exactly what the 2-10-0 Decapod wheel arrangement was built for. Ten driving wheels under the boiler meant more of the locomotive’s weight was pressing down on driven axles, which translates directly into tractive effort. No. 90 was the biggest and most powerful locomotive that short line ever owned, and by a wide margin. It wasn’t the fastest thing on the property, but it didn’t need to be. It needed to start heavy trains moving and keep them moving, and that’s what a Decapod does best.
The specifications back that up. No. 90 weighed 212,000 pounds total, with 190,000 pounds of that resting on its driving wheels, generating 48,960 pounds of tractive effort at 200 psi of boiler pressure. Those numbers describe a locomotive built for hauling, not for chasing speed records.
Its job was straightforward and unglamorous: drag long trains of loaded hopper cars full of sugar beets to the mill at Loveland, Colorado. That’s not the kind of assignment that makes headlines, but it’s exactly the kind of work steam locomotives were built for, and No. 90 did it for over forty years, from 1924 to 1967. Sugar beet railroading was seasonal, heavy, and unforgiving on equipment, which is a good part of why the Great Western Railway of Colorado wanted the most powerful machine it could get.
What happened next is really the story of No. 90. On April 5, 1967, the Strasburg Rail Road in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, bought the locomotive for $23,000. Strasburg was building its tourist excursion business and needed something bigger and more powerful than what it already had on hand. No. 90 fit the bill perfectly: a big, tough freight engine with plenty of tractive effort in reserve, purpose-built for exactly the kind of heavy pulling that a growing excursion operation would eventually need.
The railroad put it through a full restoration to operating condition, and by February 1968, less than a year after the purchase, No. 90 was back in steam. It’s been earning its keep on America’s oldest continuously operating railroad ever since, which by itself tells you something about how well this locomotive was built in 1924.
Today, Great Western No. 90 is one of only two operational Decapod-type (2-10-0) steam locomotives left in the entire United States. At Strasburg, it’s the most powerful historic steam locomotive on the property, rated to pull loads of roughly 1,211 tons. That’s the kind of muscle you’d expect from an engine that spent its working life dragging heavy beet trains, and it makes No. 90 the workhorse of Strasburg’s fleet, the locomotive the railroad reaches for when a train needs real pulling power behind it.
It runs daily tourist excursions through the Amish farmland between Strasburg and Paradise, Pennsylvania, giving passengers a steam-powered ride through some of the most scenic countryside in the state. It also just completed its FRA-mandated 1,472-day boiler inspection and overhaul in March 2025, so it’s current on its federal certification and ready for continued service. That inspection cycle is a legal requirement for any operating steam locomotive boiler in the United States, and passing it means No. 90 has been thoroughly checked over, inside and out, before being cleared to keep hauling passengers.
For visitors, that daily run between Strasburg and Paradise is one of the few places left in the country where you can watch a genuine early-twentieth-century freight Decapod work a real train, rather than see one preserved motionless on a pedestal. The line itself is short, but the experience of standing trackside as 190,000 pounds of driving wheels claw their way up to speed is not something a diesel excursion can replicate.
You can find the full spec sheet for Great Western No. 90 at its Steam Engine Database entry here, including its complete build specifications and service history.
No. 90 matters for a couple of reasons. First, it represents a type of locomotive, the Decapod, that has nearly vanished from operating rosters. With only two examples still running in the country, every trip No. 90 makes is a rare chance to see and hear a 2-10-0 working under its own power, something that would have been an everyday sight on freight-heavy short lines a century ago and is now genuinely uncommon.
Second, No. 90 is a reminder that the steam locomotives we admire today weren’t all built for glamorous passenger runs or record-setting speed. Plenty of them, like this one, were built to do hard, repetitive freight work for a small regional railroad most people have never heard of. The fact that Strasburg recognized its raw power and gave it a second career, one it’s still performing sixty years later, says something about how well these machines were built in the first place. A locomotive engineered in 1924 to haul sugar beets is, in 2025, still hauling passengers through Pennsylvania farmland on a federally certified boiler. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a testament to the quality of the original engineering and to the people who’ve kept it running ever since.
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about railroad safety and inspection standards, I find that last point especially telling. A locomotive doesn’t get to keep operating on a public excursion railroad just because it looks good sitting still. It has to pass real, recurring federal inspection cycles, boiler by boiler, year after year. The fact that No. 90 has met that bar continuously since 1968, most recently with its 1,472-day inspection completed in March 2025, means the Strasburg Rail Road’s maintenance crews have been doing rigorous, disciplined work behind the scenes for well over half a century. That’s the unglamorous side of steam preservation that visitors rarely think about when they hear the whistle blow, but it’s the reason No. 90 is still around to haul them at all.
What type of locomotive is Great Western No. 90?
It’s a 2-10-0 Decapod, a wheel arrangement with ten driving wheels built for heavy pulling power. It was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in June 1924.
Where did No. 90 originally work?
It worked on the Great Western Railway of Colorado, a short-line railroad that hauled sugar beets to a processing mill in Loveland, Colorado, from 1924 to 1967.
Where can you ride behind No. 90 today?
No. 90 hauls daily tourist excursions on the Strasburg Rail Road, running between Strasburg and Paradise, Pennsylvania.
Is No. 90 still certified to operate?
Yes. It completed its FRA-mandated 1,472-day boiler inspection and overhaul in March 2025, keeping it current for continued excursion service.