“Great Western” No. 90

Design and Construction

No. 90 was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia in June 1924 (Baldwin construction number 57812) as a 2-10-0 “Decapod” type locomotive for the Great Western Railway of Colorado, a short line built to serve the sugar beet processing industry of the South Platte Valley north of Denver. It was the largest and most powerful locomotive the Great Western ever rostered, built specifically to handle trains too heavy for the railroad’s existing fleet of smaller 2-8-0s.

Revenue Service, 1924 to the 1960s

No. 90 spent roughly four decades hauling loaded hopper cars of sugar beets from harvest fields to Great Western’s processing mills at Loveland, Longmont, Windsor, Johnstown, and Eaton, Colorado, seasonal work that peaked heavily during the fall harvest and beet campaign each year. On November 7, 1944, the locomotive was involved in a serious grade crossing collision east of Loveland, when a truck struck the engine and knocked it onto its side; the accident killed both the locomotive’s fireman and the truck’s driver, a somber chapter in an otherwise workmanlike career. No. 90 was repaired and returned to service, continuing its beet train duties through the postwar years, and by the late 1950s was also called on occasionally for excursion trips on the Great Western in addition to its regular freight work.

Sale to Strasburg

By the mid-1960s the Great Western Railway no longer had steady use for a locomotive of No. 90’s size, and it was sold to the Strasburg Rail Road in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1967, as that railroad looked for larger, more powerful steam power to handle its growing tourist excursion traffic. Published accounts differ on the exact purchase price, with figures ranging from roughly 23,000 to 50,000 dollars depending on the source, but agree on the essential fact of the sale and its purpose. Strasburg completed the work needed to bring No. 90 into operating condition for its new line by February 1968, and the locomotive entered its second working life within a year of leaving Colorado.

Decades of Excursion Service at Strasburg

Since 1968, No. 90 has been a mainstay of the Strasburg Rail Road’s daily tourist excursion operation, hauling passenger trains through the Amish farmland between Strasburg and Paradise, Pennsylvania, on what the railroad promotes as America’s oldest continuously operating railroad. As the largest and most powerful locomotive in Strasburg’s operating steam fleet, rated to pull loads up to roughly 1,211 tons, No. 90 has long been treated as the flagship of the roster, often assigned to the heaviest trains and busiest seasonal schedules.

Recent Maintenance and Current Status

Like all mainline and tourist railroad steam power operating under Federal Railroad Administration rules, No. 90 is subject to a periodic 1,472 day boiler inspection and overhaul cycle. It completed its most recent such inspection and overhaul in March 2025 and returned to its regular excursion schedule at Strasburg afterward. It remains one of only two operational Decapod type locomotives left in the United States, a rarity that, combined with its decades of continuous daily service, makes it one of the most heavily worked preserved steam locomotives in the country.

Recognition

No. 90 is widely recognized within the railroad preservation community as one of the last two operating Decapods in the country and is often referred to by Strasburg staff and railfans as the grande dame of the railroad’s steam fleet, both for its size relative to Strasburg’s other locomotives and for its long, largely uninterrupted record of daily excursion service since 1968.