NKP 765: The Last of the Great Steam Locomotives

Fort Wayne is home to one of the most celebrated steam locomotives still running in the United States. Nickel Plate Road number seven sixty-five is a two-eight-four steam locomotive, a type railroaders called a Berkshire, and it is not a museum piece behind glass. It runs.

The Berkshire type was developed in the nineteen twenties to move heavy freight at speeds that earlier steam designs could not sustain. The long wheelbase and large firebox let these engines sprint across the relatively flat terrain of the Midwest with a string of loaded cars behind them. The Nickel Plate Road, the New York, Chicago and Saint Louis Railroad that ran across northern Ohio and Indiana, ordered a fleet of Berkshires from the Lima Locomotive Works in Ohio between nineteen forty-two and nineteen forty-nine. They were among the last steam locomotives built for mainline freight service in the United States, delivered just as diesel competition was making steam economically obsolete.

Number seven sixty-five was completed at Lima in nineteen forty-four. It worked freight runs for the Nickel Plate until the railroad retired its steam fleet in the late nineteen fifties. Lima built extraordinary machines, but it could not stop the economics of diesel.

The Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society began leasing seven sixty-five in nineteen seventy-three. Volunteers spent years restoring it to operating condition. In nineteen seventy-nine, it steamed again for the first time in nearly two decades. Since then, the society has operated it on excursion runs, sometimes covering hundreds of miles on regular freight trackage by arrangement with Class One railroads.

Seven sixty-five is based in a maintenance facility near Fort Wayne and has pulled passenger excursions as far as Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. It is more than eighty years old and still performs as designed. For anyone who has never stood beside a moving steam locomotive, seven sixty-five is the argument that the experience is irreplaceable.