Union Pacific Common Standard

Harriman Standardization -- Edward H. Harriman's takeover of Southern Pacific in 1900 amounted to an all-but-merger of SP and Union Pacific. One manifestation of this situation (and of Harriman's quest for efficiency) was unified purchasing of standard locomotives and cars. At the time Union Pacific's mechanical department was in tatters after a period of control by the Goulds followed by bankruptcy so SP's mechanical department drew up plans for Common Standard locomotives of ten wheel arrangements. Parts were interchangeable among as many classes as possible, and everything was specified in detail, even the shape and size of the builder's plate and the placement of gauges in the cabs.

The equipment purchases for the Associated Lines, as the Harriman roads were known, were made by the Union Pacific Equipment Association, and they were massive purchases. For five months at the end of 1907 and beginning of 1908 the entire production of Alco's Brooks Works was an order of 125 engines of five types for SP, UP, and subsidiaries from the Oregon Sc Washington to the Cananea, Rio Yaqui y Pacifico. The Associated Lines assigned new locomotives where they were needed, which wasn't necessarily the road lettered on their cabs, and sometimes purchased more engines than were necessary, accounting for a group of Common Standard 2-8-0s on the Erie, of which Harriman was a director.

Harriman died in 1909, and Union Pacific control of Southern Pacific ended in 1913, but Harriman's policies influenced locomotive design for several more years, and his Common Standard locomotives remained in service until the end of steam.

There were Common Standards for everything from stationery and furniture to track spacings and ballast angles, as well as the rolling stock we are all familiar with. And even there, there were CS designs for working tools and for paint colors (buildings and machinery as well as cars and locomotives).

I don't believe any railroads outside the Associated Lines (SP and UP) used Common Standards except piecemeal as something appealed to them. A few of the "Harriman" roads like IC and Erie did acquire small amounts of CS rolling stock, but evidently by choice, not by dictum from Harriman. I commented on this in Appendix 3 of Volume 4 about Box Cars in my Southern Pacific Freight Cars book series.

Both SP and UP promptly diverged in their designs after 1913, with SP almost immediately building single-sheathed box cars which were NOT CS designs. But both railroads continued with some things they evidently liked, such as the CS passenger car color, and the basic stock car. The SP had developed and used Common Standards since 1895, and when Kruttschnitt applied them to the entire Associated Lines in 1904, it was natural that many UP people found things they didn't like. After 1913, both roads were free to move away from the Harriman-era standards, and both did.

But to say they stopped using CS is misleading. The entire idea was to provide standards for anything on the railroad which was bought in quantity. That idea certainly continued long after the Harriman era, even if not officially called "CS." And obviously there were certain aspects, such as freight car classification, in which UP TODAY uses a slightly modified Harriman Common Standard, as did SP up to 1996. (Tony Thompson, email to Espee Yahoo group, dated December 2, 2009)

Harriman was a visionary student of corporate organization, willing to apply modern management theory to organizations that were previously content to think small. An important decision was to appoint Julius Kruttschnitt, a Southern Pacific official, to the new position of director of maintenance and operations for the combined system. His task was to bring UP and SP into step with each other, which meant bringing the financially sound (but under-engineered) SP up to the standards Harriman was then imposing on Union Pacific.

Kruttschnitt in turn tapped Henry Small, SP's general superintendent of motive power, to chair a committee of his peers from the associated Harriman-controlled railroads. Small had at his disposal staff resources unavailable on the Union Pacific, whose motive power staff had been decimated and scattered in the course of that road's recent bankruptcy. So it would be draftsmen in Sacramento, not Omaha, Neb.,who would ink the drawings to establish the next generation of motive power.

In July 1902, this committee met to formulate standards for this new generation of locomotives. Future orders for locomotives would emanate from Kruttschnitt's office and would be doled out as required to Union Pacific, Oregon Short Line, Oregon Railroad & Navigation Co., Southern Pacific, Chicago & Alton, and Kansas City Southern. At the time these roads comprised about 18,000 miles of track and operated more than 3,000 locomotives and 30,000 freight cars. The labors of the Mechanical Committee resulted in standardization of every detail of these new classes of locomotives, freight cars, and passenger cars, adopting the best ideas from each mechanical department and gathering input as well from the locomotive builders. For instance, the original drawing for what became the Common Standard locomotive cab was inked at Sacramento back in 1895.

Four types were adopted: Atlantic ( 4-4-2) type passenger, Pacific ( 4-6-2) type passenger, Consolidation (2-8-0) freight, and heavy switcher (0-6-0). Harriman intended to provide for all the demands of the immediate future from these four designs. The "top end" of each client road's locomotive roster was to be completely supplanted by new, standard locomotives, while existing, light locomotives would be utilized to provide secondary service until their maintenance costs grew excessive.