The USRA standard locomotives and railroad cars were designed by the United States Railroad Administration, the nationalised rail system of the United States during World War I. 1,856 steam locomotives and over 100,000 railroad cars were built to these designs during the USRA's tenure. The locomotive designs in particular were the nearest the American railroads and locomotive builders ever got to standard locomotive types, and after the USRA was dissolved in 1920 many of the designs were duplicated in number, 3,251 copies being constructed overall. The last steam locomotive built for a Class I railroad in the United States, an 0-8-0 built by the Norfolk and Western Railway, was a USRA design. A total of 97 railroads used USRA or USRA-derived locomotives.
Read more about USRA Standard: Steam Locomotive Types, Freight Cars
Famous quotes containing the word standard:
“As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.”
—Thomas S. Kuhn (b. 1922)