Charles Henry Caruthers developed a fascination with the engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad at an early age. This fascination manifested itself in a lifelong effort to document the locomotives of this major railroad company. Beginning as a child, he produced a visual record of these engines—in their full color—which he continued until at least 1919, the year before his death.

This catalog of Caruthers’ work is the first time that the complete collection of Caruthers’ mature drawings have been reproduced in color.

As he grew older his technical skills progressed and advanced as he continued his lifelong work. Caruthers can be considered an “Audubon” of the early railroad age. Audubon sought to create a visual record of American natural history as it was in the 19th century, his observations and notes made while in the field were also invaluable. Audubon’s goal was to see his work published.

Caruthers, like Audubon, devoted years of his life to the pursuit of his goal—Caruthers sought to record the locomotives of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In his later works not only are the locomotives depicted in minute detail but also in their full color. Caruthers also provides exhaustive technical specifications and historical information, in his calligraphic script below each locomotive. He provides information not only about the engine depicted, but for each engine of similar build and type. Caruthers’ work provides a time capsule of 19th century American railroad locomotives—and a glimpse of what American “motive power” looked like as it rumbled across America.

We lack an archive of Caruthers’ personal papers and correspondence, so we do not know how Caruthers planned to publish his work. His sudden death in 1920 likely upended any plans along those lines. His meticulous attention to detail and efforts at complete accuracy in each drawing, which were in many cases worked on over a period of years, certainly hints that he intended a wider audience than the occasional illustration in one of his articles in railroad periodicals. Caruthers’ work certainly merits publication now.

We tend to think of 19th century locomotives in a monochrome of either shades of gray or sepia, based on old Hollywood movies and old photographs. The reality was, according to Caruthers, much more technicolor.

The drawings in this collection were numbered by Caruthers from 301-511, and they were drawn and colored between 1896 and 1919. The locomotives depicted were all owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. They were manufactured by many of the leading manufacturers of the 19th century, including Baldwin, Norris, New Jersey, and Winans, as well as more obscure builders like Lancaster, Wilmarth, and Smith & Perkins, of Alexandria, Virginia, as well as those built by the Pennsylvania Railroad itself in their shops at Altoona and Pittsburgh.

Sample Images of the catalog can be seen on this page. The entire catalog can be accessed via this link:

https://www.michaelbrownrarebooks.com/_files/ugd/28c250_c702becb04e44d388610efbb7a00ceae.pdf 

     Charles Henry Caruthers, 1847-1920

“Charles Henry Caruthers was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Sept. 23, 1847. His father, William Franklin Caruthers, was an associate of Tom Scott, later president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a railway magnate of the first rank. The Pennsylvania Railroad had an interest in the coal mines near Irwin, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, (located 22 miles southeast of Pittsburgh), and at Scott’s behest, the elder Caruthers took over as superintendent of the mines in 1853, His fellow company officers included personalities well known to railroad historians, Herman Haupt and William Jackson Palmer. The mines became a large and powerful company, Westmoreland Coal, which is still in operation today. Charles Henry, C. H., was William’s only surviving child by his first wife, Martha, who died when C.H. was 29. He had six half-brothers from his father’s second marriage.

         It was his father’s important position and prosperity that provided for C. H.’s extravagant daily commute to school in Pittsburgh. Caruthers’ father found a good use for his son’s interest in railroad matters. The Westmoreland Coal Co. shipped cola by rail. “One of my duties after school hours,” C. H. wrote, “was filling up a report of the numbers of cars loaded each day.”¹ This soon turned into the young man’s first big job. From 1869 until 1880, C.H. was superintendent of the Westmoreland Coal Co.’s car department. He showed all the propensity for invention common to American youths of the time. In 1874, he was assigned one-half rights to a patent for an improved coupling pin. In 1876, he and his associates experimented with continuous iron draft gear for coal cars, an innovation that reduced coupling damage but was ultimately frowned upon by the conservative Pennsylvania Railroad.²

          By 1880, he was no longer working for the coal company. The U.S. Census that year lists his occupation as “lumber dealer.” He remained single, living with his parents, until 1887, when the 40-year-old “insurance agent,” as he was now described on the license, married 18-year-old Effie Crum (1869-1943).³ “

          By 1896 Caruthers began his lengthy series of articles in major railroad publications. “C. H.’s byline in the August 1896 issue of Locomotive Engineering gives his residence as Pittsburgh. This early article, “An Old-Time Coal Car,” filled nearly a page and described the early eight-wheel drop-bottom gondolas used by the Philadelphia & Reading. It was illustrated with one of the author’s meticulous line drawings. It’s a good guess that draftsmanship was one of the things C. H. studied at his fancy Pittsburgh school.

          The November 1896 issue of Locomotive Engineering featured the first of his remarkable locomotive drawings – an 1852 Smith & Perkins 2-6-0 of the Pennsylvania Railroad. His description of the engine was thorough and starting: “Jacket of Russia iron fastened with bands of same, on boiler, … wheels, cab, sandbox, dome cornices, tender frame and cisterns, all painted vermillion; pumps, frames, buckhorns, stack, cow-catcher, smokebox… cylinders, springs and tender wheels all painted black; and truck frames of tender trucks were painted in dark ochre.”

         Over the next 24 years C. H. placed around 50 articles and letters of similar descriptive quality in major railroad publications. In a May 1898 Railroad Gazette, he wrote about the early Baldwin engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In July of the following year, the Gazette printed his article on the early fast passenger locomotives of the Pennsy. An issue in August 1900 contained a history of Pennsylvania Railroad engine paint schemes. Railway and Locomotive Engineering of March 1904 saw Caruthers examining the work of locomotive builder Ross Winans. Early locomotives of the United Railways of New Jersey and the Reading were written up in Gazettes from January and July 1907.

           His technical articles are still important to locomotive scholarship today. He described early experiments with smoke-consuming fireboxes, with detailed diagrams in the December 1, 1905, Railroad Gazette. In the August 17, 1906, issue, he authored a lengthy treatise on the lengthy treatise on the early valve gear types of the Pennsylvania Railroad. One issue later, August 24, he provided a massive article on the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Early experiments with locomotives on the Pennsylvania Railroad came on February 22, 1907. A description of the engines of the obscure Virginia builder Smith & Perkins appeared in the April 19, 1907, issue. In a successive pair of Gazettes in June 1908, he described the extensive 1875 air brake tests in England.

           In the August 1909 Railroad Gazette, Caruthers presented a three-part history of the Norris Locomotive Works and its engines, possibly the first time the firm had been spotlighted in print since its closing in the middle 1860s. This article was deemed important enough that Charles Fisher chose to reprint it in the 1925 R&LHS Bulletin No. 10, after Caruthers’ death.

           Exacting in his information, Caruthers carried on lengthy correspondence with J. Snowden Bell, Matthias Forney, Angus Sinclair, and other rail journalists. He combed through the records of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baldwin Locomotive Works for technical specifications. On one notable occasion, he hired a photographer to crawl under a B&O Winans camel to photograph the intricacies of the valve gear. Bell, Sinclair, and others used Caruthers’ drawings to illuminate their own writings.

           By 1898, C. H. Caruthers and his family had relocated to the Philadelphia area, first to Adamsford, then to Lansdowne, then, in 1902, Yeadon. All were, at the time, suburbs southwest of the city. Yeadon is now an urban borough, situated six miles from the city center. The 1910 census lists him as a renter at 400 East Church Lane, an address he would keep for the rest of his life. His occupation is given as “assistant editor of a trade paper.” His two adult children were living with him and wife Effie, Wallace B. (1888-1962) and Elleanore A. (1889-1942).

           Surprisingly, the trade paper Caruthers worked for had nothing to do with railroads. It was the Philadelphia-based Miller’s Review – miller as in flour milling. It was at a milling industry convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that C. H. Caruthers suffered a serious stroke. He died a few days later, on Sept. 18, 1920. He was 72.

           His last contribution appeared in the June 1920 issue of Railway & Locomotive Engineering, where he shared an old lithograph of the Lancaster-built Philadelphia & Columbia engine Breckinridge: “It was gorgeously painted in varied and brilliant colors, the truck and tender wheels in vermillion, the two domes, like the pillars of Solomon’s temple, glittered in burnished brass; the cylinders, steam chests, and sandbox being also jacketed with that material, which likewise blossomed into corrugated bands at intervals over the boiler jacket. And, as if this was not enough, brilliant brass plates bearing the builder’s badge covered the ends of the axles on both drivers and truck wheels.”

          In 1924, a series of articles by Paul T. Warner appeared in Baldwin Locomotives, a quarterly magazine published by the builder. The articles were later reprinted in book form as Motive Power Development on the Pennsylvania Railroad System 1831-1924. The book contains a trove of Caruthers drawings, some known from the Railroad Gazette articles, but others were apparently black-and-white halftones of colored drawings, that have never been reproduced in color. Historian Richard D. Adams also made extensive use of Caruthers’ line drawings in his definitive Locomotives of the Pennsylvania Railroad Volume 1, the Early Years, 1848 to 1874, published by the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society in 2010.”- John Ott, “C. H. Caruthers, 1847-1920 A Pioneer of American Locomotive History”, Railroad History, Fall-Winter 2018, Number 219, pp. 80-87

Caruthers’ original artworks vanished until the offering of the surviving examples here. The William Halsey collection of locomotive watercolors at the DeGolyer Library is the only institutional holding that rivals Caruthers collection offered here.  (See: https://www.smu.edu/libraries/digitalcollections/hal).The Halsey Collection consists of 84 watercolors, contains 84 watercolor drawings by William Halsey (born ca. 1845- died ca. 1900), a railroad enthusiast probably working in the New York region as early as 1863 until the 1890s. The Halsey watercolors do not contain the detailed technical information found on each of the Caruthers drawings. The Caruthers collection of over 200 colored line drawings as well as rare photographs dwarfs it. This collection with its wealth of descriptive drawings, technical notes for each locomotive, and the paintings provide an almost unique visual record of their appearances – all the paint, brass, and vivid color that made each engine unique. The Caruthers archive is the best record of mid-Atlantic states locomotives during the middle 1800s. 

Caruthers’ mature technical drawings have never been published in their full color, only a few examples were published in half-tone after his death. In January 2016, 11 of his teenaged locomotive color sketches appeared in a Sotheby’s auction, labeled as “folk art”. One of the sketches bore a penciled note: “No. 84 of sett.” – an indication of the amount of work he produced as a child. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2016/american-folk-art-collection-of-stephen-petra-levin-part-i-n09424/lot.1438.html?locale=en

    The present collection of drawings, each numbered, testifies to his continued prodigious output, thirty years later, and his advanced technical skills.

           The rediscovered Caruthers archive is a monumental resource that will prove invaluable to scholars and researchers of American transportation history.

1.     Locomotive Engineering, Aug. 1896, p. 681

2.     The coupling pin is U.S. Patent No. 147,428, Feb. 10, 1874. The draft gear experiment is described in Locomotive Engineering, August 1896, p. 681.

3.     Marriage License Docket, Westmoreland County, Pa., Pennsylvania, Marriages, 1852-1968. [database on-line]. Lehi, Utah, Ancestry.com