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:
“An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)