Texas and Pacific No. 610, The Superpower Steam Locomotive

In Palestine, Texas, the Texas and Pacific locomotive Number Six Ten sits on display as the sole surviving example of a machine that changed American railroading forever. It is not just a big steam engine. It is the last surviving example of Lima's early Superpower design, the moment when locomotive design took a decisive leap forward and the modern steam age began.

Number Six Ten was built by the Lima Locomotive Works in Ohio in June nineteen twenty-seven. Its classification was the I-one-a, a two-ten-four configuration, ten drive wheels in the center to haul the load, two small wheels up front to guide the locomotive, four trailing wheels to support the heavy firebox. Lima's chief designer, William Woodard, had refined this arrangement in the years just before, and the result was the Superpower concept: a larger, more efficient boiler fed by a mechanically superior valve system, capable of sustaining high horsepower at speed over long distances rather than just at low speeds under heavy loads.

The Texas and Pacific eventually owned seventy of these machines to haul freight across the flat distances of Texas and Louisiana. Number Six Ten hauled freight on those lines until nineteen fifty, just twenty-three years after it was built, retired not because it failed but because diesel locomotives were cheaper to operate.

Then it got a second life. In nineteen seventy-six, Six Ten was selected to power the American Freedom Train through Texas, commemorating the nation's Bicentennial. It then moved to the Southern Railway's steam excursion program, pulling passenger trains across the Southeast between nineteen seventy-seven and nineteen eighty-one, delighting crowds who had never seen a working steam locomotive. It is now an American Society of Mechanical Engineers Historic Landmark, recognized as a defining achievement in engineering history.