B&O 'Lafayette' at the Century of Progress Exposition

A historic locomotive replica displayed at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933-34 was the Baltimore & Ohio's Lafayette. Built by William Norris & Company of Philadelphia in 1837, she was the first B&O locomotive to employ a horizontal boiler. Other innovations were the positioning of cylinders ahead of the smokebox and the four-wheel swiveling pilot truck. The Lafayette established the configuration steam locomotives would follow until the end of the steam era. The replica was first exhibited in 1927 at the B&O's centenary exposition, "The Fair of the Iron Horse." The locomotive was used in the 1939 MGM film "Stand Up and Fight," for which a promotional race with a stagecoach was filmed at Cumberland, Maryland.

The Lafayette, along with the York and the camelback Ross Winans, is described in a booklet issued by the B&O Transportation Museum around 1950. With cylinder dimensions of 9x18 inches, a 90-pound boiler pressure and 48-inch drivers, she produced 2,323 pounds of tractive effort. Locomotive and tender together were 29 feet long and weighed 41,120 pounds. At the time the booklet was printed the Lafayette replica had appeared in several motion pictures about railroading in the early West, and was still operative.