24. The Sellers Locomotive 



The America, first of the two Sellers locomotives, 

 was delivered to the Philadelphia and Columbia 

 Railroad in the late summer of 1835. 224 



In order to reinforce his own memory as to the 

 exact date, the author wrote to his brother Charles 

 and asked him for evidence that would fix the 

 date. Charles replied: 225 



Our first locomotive was put on the Rail Rd. in 

 1835. I ran it for one week before we asked the 

 Commissioners to take a trial trip to Lancaster 

 and back. 



The nearest date I can fix on was when field corn 

 was in the milk in good condition for roasting ears. 

 I know this because one of the two shop hands I 



had with me went into a field, when I stopped the 

 train to do something to the engine, and roasted 

 them in the ash box. 



The second and last Sellers locomotive, called 

 Sampson, probably was delivered during the same 

 year. Soon surpassed in performance by loco- 

 motives from the shops of Matthias Baldwin and 

 William Norris, however, the Sellers locomotives 

 were within a year or two placed in ordinary. 

 Eventually they joined the hundreds of other 

 locomotives that have, in some detailed way, 

 helped to point the direction of advance, but that 

 have not possessed the total excellence that would 

 have made them leaders of the procession. 



li,ARLY in august, 1 835. when our first engine was 

 about ready to be placed on the road, Mr. Cameron, 

 accompanied by Mr. Brandt, came to our works to 

 inspect it. Mr. Cameron brought with him drawings 

 of an attachment invented and patented 2M by Mr. 

 Edgar L. Miller of the Charleston and Hamburg R. R. 

 of South Carolina, by which a part of the weight of 



221 The chronological table of locomotives on the Philadelphia 

 and Columbia that is perhaps most widely circulated is the one 

 in the annual report of the railroad for 1837, reproduced in 

 Watkins (cited in note 177 above), vol. 1, pp. I37a-I37b. 

 However, when this report is compared with others submitted 

 by various Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad officials, a 

 number of errors are at once apparent. The date given here 

 for the Sellers locomotive is confirmed in a report dated Octo- 

 ber 30, 1835, reproduced in Watkins, p. 129. The U.S. 

 Treasury's "Report on Steam Engines" (cited in note 173 

 above), p. 169, lists both Sellers locomotives as having been 

 built in 1835. 



225 Letter from Charles Sellers to George Escol Sellers dated 

 at Woodstock, July 23, 1884, copy in Paul T. Warner papers, 

 division of transportation, Smithsonian Institution. 



226 U.S. patent of June 19, 1834. 



the tender could be thrown on the driving-wheels 

 when an increased adhesion was required, directing 

 us to put it on our engine, they paying the additional 

 expense as well as for the patent right. 



Anticipating this, or rather doubting the traction of 

 the drivers, as placed back of the fire-box, being 

 equal to the steam-power, I had devised and applied 

 a lever arrangement, the fulcrum of which was the 

 axle of the driving-wheels. 227 The attachment of the 

 tender to the engine was so made that at all times when 

 drawing a train a portion of the weight of the front 

 of the engine was removed from the truck and thrown 

 on the driving-wheels; this increased with the draft 

 in ascending grades, as additional traction was re- 

 quired, being automatic in its action. This device 

 was approved of and applied to our early engines, as 

 was the Miller arrangement to the Baldwin engines, 

 until the better distribution of weight on two pair 

 of drivers was adopted. 



227 U.S. patent of May 22, 1835, by Charles Sellers and 

 George Escol Sellers. 



172 



