Reading Company No. 425

No. 425 is a 4-6-2 “Pacific” type steam locomotive, one of a pair of class G-1 Pacifics built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia in January 1928 for the Gulf, Mobile & Northern Railroad (GM&N) in Mississippi. With 69-inch drivers and a 210 psi boiler producing 35,000 lbf of tractive effort, it was built for fast, lightweight passenger service on the GM&N’s line between Jackson, Tennessee and Mobile, Alabama. When the GM&N merged into the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio in 1940, the locomotive was renumbered 580 and continued in passenger service until its retirement in 1950.

Rather than being scrapped, No. 425 (as it was renumbered) was purchased by railroad preservationist Paulson Spence for his Louisiana Eastern Railroad in October 1950, beginning a long career shuttling among excursion operators. The Reading & Northern’s predecessor company purchased the locomotive in August 1984, and it appeared at the grand opening of the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton in 1995. In 1992 it was repainted into a dark blue scheme evoking the Reading Company’s own famous blue-painted Pacifics, cementing its adopted identity as a “Reading Company” engine even though it never wore Reading markings in original service.

No. 425 returned to regular revenue passenger excursion service in 2007 and remains one of the Reading & Northern’s active steam locomotives, based at the railroad’s Port Clinton, Pennsylvania shops alongside sister engines No. 2102 and No. 2100. It typically hauls shorter passenger consists and special seasonal excursions through the Schuylkill and Lehigh valleys of eastern Pennsylvania, and periodically cycles through scheduled federal boiler inspections and overhauls between operating seasons.