Chesapeake and Ohio 2755
preserved American 2-8-4 locomotive (C&O class K-4)

Chesapeake & Ohio Railway 2755 is a preserved class "K-4" 2-8-4 "Kanawha" "(Berkshire) type steam locomotive built in 1947 by the Lima Locomotive Works for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) It is the 56th of ninety built by
ALCO (which built seventy) and Lima (which built the remaining twenty, including 2755) between 1943 and 1947.
A Berkshire type was the first of the Lima Super Power locomotives in 1925 and these followed in that tradition, with all the latest equipment -- Schmidt superheater, Elesco feedwater heater, booster on the trailing truck, roller bearings, and so forth. They carried Baker valve gear, whereas the C&O preferred to the simpler and much more widely used Walschaerts valve gear.
It spent its nine-year working life hauling coal on the various mine branches out of Logan, West Virginia, usually to the Ohio River at Russell, Kentucky. Its last known run was from Handley, West Virginia, to Russell on January 18, 1956.
After refurbishing at the Huntington, West Virginia, shops in the fall of 1960, it was delivered to its present location in Chief Logan State Park in March 1961. It was seriously vandalized in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with the glass broken and gauges stolen or destroyed. It has been repaired and fenced for protection. The Island Creek Model Railroad Club acts as curators.
The locomotive was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 28, 2006 as Chesapeake and Ohio 2755 Steam Locomotive.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chesapeake and Ohio 2755” is preserved American 2-8-4 locomotive (C&O class K-4). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chesapeake, Ohio and preserved, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5005780. Authority coordinates are 37.893, -82.009. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1943, 1925 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chesapeake and Ohio 2755” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.