Keatah

This will sound idiotic at first glance, but that's actually not too impressive.

Thanks to the magic that's known as roller bearings that a company named Timken introduced to American railroads in the early days of the Great Depression, stunts like this with a fully loaded steam locomotive and a handful of young women back in the 30's and 40's pulling on a rope were fairly commonplace for company photographers and newsreel cameramen.

I've seen photographs of at least a half dozen such events when a railroad wanted to publicize how modern their new power was by highlighting the installation of roller bearings, with the women typically pulling the locomotive in both directions just to prove that it wasn't on a slight grade. And with modern steam power of the time often topping the scales at around the million pound mark with a fully loaded tender (And sometimes well over, like a Union Pacific 'Big Boy'), the weight is in the same range as what this F-150 was pulling.

More than being an impressive showcase for Ford's truck, it's more so a demonstration of just how little rolling resistance that roller bearings offer when the axles on locomotives and rolling stock are equipped with it.

Here's one such example pulled off Google Images of a late publicity attempt of the style I'm mentioning (The New York Central bought their famous but short lived Niagaras just after WWII had ended on the eve of embracing dieselization, at a point where roller bearings were beginning to be so widely accepted on new locomotives that it would soon not be newsworthy). Only 900,000 pounds, but close enough.

Of course! This makes me remember playing with an oil-bearing demonstration at the MSI Chicago. You could move this 50,000 lb rotor/wheel with no more force than busting a pencil in half.

Me and my buddies got to whailing on it till it was going at a good clip. Then each of us taking turns guarding it all morning watching to see if it would stop. It did not.