Southern Railway No. 4501

No. 4501 was built in October 1911 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia (builder’s number 37085) as the first 2-8-2 “Mikado” type locomotive ordered by the Southern Railway. It spent its early decades on freight assignments across the Southern system, eventually working out of Kentucky, where crews nicknamed it “The Big Engine” for its hauling capacity compared to older power on the roster. Southern retired No. 4501 from revenue freight service in 1948 and sold it to the short-line Kentucky and Tennessee Railway in Stearns, Kentucky, where it continued hauling coal.

When the K&T dieselized in 1964, Chattanooga railfan Paul Merriman purchased No. 4501 for $5,000 of his own money and brought it home to Tennessee. Restored and returned to steam, it became the flagship of the Southern Railway’s celebrated steam excursion program starting in 1966, running mainline specials across the Southeast for nearly two decades in the railroad’s Sylvan green and gold passenger livery — a scheme normally reserved for diesels, applied to a steam locomotive as a point of pride. It was retired again in 1998 after decades of hard excursion use.

Between 2011 and 2014, the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum (TVRM) in Chattanooga completed a comprehensive overhaul of No. 4501, adding a feedwater heater and mechanical stoker, and returned it to Norfolk Southern’s 21st Century Steam excursion program. Today No. 4501 is TVRM’s senior operating locomotive, based at the museum’s East Chattanooga shops and regularly powering excursions such as the Missionary Ridge Local and the Summerville Steam Special. It is significant as the oldest operating Mikado-type steam locomotive in North America and one of the longest continuously preserved mainline steam engines in the country.