C&O/Chessie 18742: Huntington’s Battery Shop Switcher

Published: September 4, 2026

At the Huntington, West Virginia shops —from the 1950s through the Chessie years and into early CSX—was a single 15-ton General Electric storage-battery locomotive, numbered 18742. It is the oldest locomotive Chessie ever lettered, the only battery unit on that roster, and the only engine on it with a five-digit number. Railfans called it a critter. The B&O Railroad Museum lists it as C&O X-5000, nickname Dinky.

It was not built for the C&O. General Electric turned it out at Erie, Pennsylvania, in October 1917 as a Type LSB-2E12 industrial switcher. GE used it briefly in its own shops, sold it in 1918 to Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock as E-6, and the yard kept it through the Second World War. The C&O picked it up in the 1950s, just as Huntington Shops were converting from steam to diesel, and put it to work moving dead locomotives around the house without filling the building with exhaust.

Chessie System GE battery shop switcher 18742 at Huntington Shops West Virginia May 1984 Rob Kitchen

Chessie System battery shop switcher 18742 at the Huntington Shops, Huntington, West Virginia, May 1984. The Chessie employee posing with the locomotive and the hostler in the cab are both not identified. Rob Kitchen photo.

On this page: At a glance · Erie and Newport News · C&O, X-5000, 18742 · The Huntington job · Blue, Chessie, CSX · Donation and where it sits · Specifications · Related reading · Sources

At a glance

Item	Detail
Railroad	Chesapeake & Ohio, then Chessie System, then CSX Transportation
Road numbers	C&O X-5000 (1950s); 18742 (1950s/60s on). Photographed as CSXT 18742 in 1988
Nickname	Dinky (museum listing); critter (railfan)
Builder / type	General Electric, Erie, Pa. Type LSB-2E12 storage-battery locomotive, 15 ton
Built	October 1917. Museum listing sometimes reads 1918—the year it left GE for the shipyard
First owners	GE Erie shops (briefly); Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock E-6, 1918 through World War II
C&O	Acquired in the 1950s. Huntington, W.Va., locomotive shops for the rest of its working life
Wheel arrangement	Four-wheel industrial (AAR B / Whyte 0-4-0). Two axles, no guiding trucks
Why battery	Move dead and under-repair locomotives inside the shop without diesel exhaust
Chessie oddities	Oldest unit; only battery; only five-digit number; Ches-C on both ends; no road initials stacked with the number
Last documented at Huntington	July 27, 1988 (Wade H. Massie), already in CSX paint
Disposition	CSX donated it to the B&O Railroad Museum. Not a regular roundhouse exhibit. See preservation notes below

Type, dates, and number history follow the standard secondary account of this locomotive (the Chessie 18742 notes on TrainWeb) checked against dated photographs and the museum listing. Information compiled September 4, 2026.

Erie, then Newport News E-6

General Electric cataloged storage-battery industrials under the LSB prefix for mills, mines, and shipyards: two axles, a short frame, a battery box for a body, enough drawbar pull to drag a few cars or a dead locomotive a few hundred feet. A 15-ton unit is on the order of 30,000 pounds. A Chessie GP40-2 on the next track weighed about nine times that.

GE finished this one in October 1917 at Erie and ran it in the builder’s own shops before selling it in 1918 to Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company as E-6. That yard is not a random industrial customer. It sits at the C&O’s tidewater coal terminal. Collis P. Huntington had pushed the railroad to the Ohio, named the West Virginia city for himself, and founded the shipyard at the other end of the same coal route. The locomotive worked the yard through the end of the Second World War. How it left the shipyard and reached C&O property in the 1950s is not in a published builder card; the railroad simply shows up as the next owner.

X-5000, then 18742

C&O took the engine in the 1950s and numbered it X-5000. The X- prefix is company-service numbering, not a road-freight slot. Sometime later in that decade or in the 1960s it became 18742. The number is not the GE serial. Why Huntington picked it has not been explained in print. It is the only five-digit locomotive number Chessie ever carried, which is how you find it in a caption index when the paint is too dirty to read.

The B&O Railroad Museum still catalogs the piece as C&O X-5000, Dinky, built by GE in 1918. That 1918 date is the shipyard year. The build month is October 1917.

The Huntington job

Huntington Shops grew up with the town. The C&O reached the Ohio in 1873; the shops opened the same year. The main building sat on 6th Avenue between 23rd and 29th streets—more than two city blocks long. A June 19, 1954, Huntington Advertiser feature, later reprinted by the Herald-Dispatch, described the plant converting from steam to diesel: a new wheel shop, an electrical shop, the roundhouse reduced to paint and storage because a diesel does not have to be turned. Plant superintendent Lester Savage put employment at 1,159. The shops took locomotives and cars from Handley east of Charleston through to the C&O’s western connections; Russell, Kentucky, and Peru, Indiana, still had shops, but a lot of the heavy work still came to Huntington.

That conversion is why a battery goat made sense. A diesel switcher idling inside a repair bay fills the house with exhaust. A 15-ton storage-battery locomotive does not. It did not classify the yard. It did not take a transfer down to the river. It shoved dead Geeps and U-boats from the door to the pit and back. CSX still works locomotives at Huntington; that later hydrogen-and-rebuild program is a different story. 18742 was the in-house battery mule of the C&O/Chessie shop, not a prototype for the 21st-century fleet.

Enchantment Blue, Chessie both ends, CSX stealth

In C&O years it wore standard Enchantment Blue with a safety slogan on the nose: BE CAREFUL. That slogan is the only one reported on a C&O locomotive paint scheme. The blue job also skipped the usual “C&O” stacked with the road number.

Chessie paint came early in the Chessie era—yellow hood, vermilion band, Enchantment Blue roof and frame, kitten-in-C on the end. Kitchen’s 1984 view is that scheme in working dirt, Ches-C facing the camera, 18742 on the cab, a GP40-2 numbered 4167 inside the door behind it. Secondary notes on this locomotive say it was the only Chessie engine with the Ches-C on both ends, and that it again skipped the road initials over the number. The 1977 Huntington photograph already shows worn Chessie paint, which matches an early repaint rather than a 1980s cosmetic.

CSX Transportation began operating the merged Chessie and Seaboard properties on July 1, 1986. 18742 received the early gray-and-blue “stealth” scheme shortly afterward, again without “CSXT” under the number. Wade Massie photographed it that way at the Huntington shop on July 27, 1988, and called it probably the most unusual unit on CSX’s roster. That is the last well-dated in-service view in public photo indexes known to this author. A retirement year is not on a published disposition card.

Donation, the museum list, and later photographs

CSX donated 18742 to the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore after it came out of Huntington. The museum’s collection list on this site carries it under the electric locomotives as C&O battery-powered yard switcher X-5000, Dinky, General Electric, 1918. It sits in that list with B&O CE-1 boxcab 10 (GE, 1909) and Pennsylvania GG1 4876.

It is not a regular public exhibit. The museum’s own “on view” locomotive pages do not feature it.

Specifications

Published numbers for this one locomotive are thin. GE did not issue a Class I data card. What follows is the industrial type as identified for 18742, not a claim that every LSB-2 of 1917 matched it inch for inch.

Specification	Value
Builder	General Electric, Erie, Pa.
Date	October 1917
Type	LSB-2E12 storage-battery locomotive
Weight class	15 ton
Wheel arrangement	B (four-wheel / 0-4-0 industrial)
Power	Onboard storage battery; no overhead, no diesel, no trolley pole
Service	Shipyard, then railroad shop switching. Not road freight
Identities	GE (1917–18); NNS E-6 (1918–c. 1945/50s); C&O X-5000; C&O/Chessie/CSX 18742

GE’s period LSB tables listed 15-ton two-motor battery locomotives with hand or straight-air brakes and a few thousand pounds of rated drawbar pull at walking speed. That is shop-goat arithmetic. It is enough to spot a dead road unit on a shop lead. It is not a yard engine.

Chesapeake & Ohio Railway
Chessie System
CSX Transportation
Electric locomotives
Switcher locomotives
C&O diesel roster (18742 is not on it)
B&O Railroad Museum
West Virginia railroads
Genset / Green Goat locomotives (later battery-hybrid switchers, not this engine)
PRR B1 electric switchers

Sources

Rob Kitchen, RailPictures.net photo 130991: 18742 at Huntington Shops, May 1984, “proud crew”; sent to the B&O Railroad Museum
Extra 127 South, RailPictures.net photo 451958: C&O 18742 at Huntington Locomotive Shop, November 11, 1977; used to move locomotives undergoing repairs
Wade H. Massie, RailPictures.net photo 156748: CSXT 18742 at Huntington Locomotive Shop, July 27, 1988
TrainWeb, “C&O / CSX 18742”: GE October 1917, Type LSB-2E12, 15 ton; GE Erie shops; Newport News Shipbuilding E-6 from 1918 through World War II; C&O X-5000 then 18742 in the 1950s/60s; Huntington assignment; Enchantment Blue “BE CAREFUL”; early Chessie paint, Ches-C both ends, no road initials with the number; CSX stealth; donated to the B&O Railroad Museum, not operable and not on display
American-Rails.com, B&O Railroad Museum collection list (/borm.html): C&O battery-powered yard switcher X-5000, Dinky, General Electric, 1918
B&O Railroad Museum, locomotives and rolling stock “on view” pages: 18742 / X-5000 not among featured exhibits
Huntington Advertiser, June 19, 1954, via Herald-Dispatch “Do you remember?” (September 19, 2011): Huntington Shops conversion from steam to diesel; 6th Avenue between 23rd and 29th; employment 1,159
Thomas W. Dixon, Jr., Chesapeake & Ohio Railway: A Concise History and Fact Book (C&O Historical Society): Huntington as the C&O’s major locomotive shops
2024 visitor videos labeled Lake Shore Railway Museum, North East, Pa. (matching CSX-painted battery switcher in outdoor storage). Not a museum accession statement
Lake Shore Railway Historical Society, published rolling-stock list: 18742 not named

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