If you read huddlestons book you will also find out the c&o sued lima for lying about the weight on drivers. This engine just did not do what it was supposed to. What would the weight on drivers do if they ran the engines at 60 mph. Tear up the track. The 2-10-4 was the superior engine for c&o in the LONG run. How one of them to run?
According to what I've read, there was no track damage problem with the 2-6-6-6s at that particular speed; it's just that the general weight was far too much. They seem to have been pretty well counterbalanced.
I haven't seen all the particulars about the lawsuit, but saying Lima flat lied about their weight seems a little extreme. If you read Hrsimaki and Huddleston closely, you'll note that C&O's mechanical folks visited the drawing boards often during the design process, and often asked that certain parts be "beefed up". Side and main rods were mentioned. Therefore, it seems to me that Lima had a rebuttal, at least in part, for the suit. Maybe that was taken into account in the settlement - I don't know.
Of course, the prime mover in this suit was the engineer's union, which felt cheated out of a lot of weight-on-drivers pay, and they were probably right. They filed claims for all the trips engine crews had made, which amounted evidently to a considerable sum of money, which C&O tried to recoup from Lima. I've forgotten just what it was that tipped the unions off, but it's in there somewhere.
And it's obvious that the C&O 2-10-4s (and maybe their KCS sisters as well) were actually Lima's finest locomotives.
EdKing
