The Pennsylvania Railroad owned a total of 574 of these locomotives. They were PRR class L1. All were built between 1914 and 1919 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works, Lima Locomotive Works, and the PRR's Juniata/Altoona workshop. The prototype photo of #203 on the right came from the Fallen Flags web site. There are additional photos available in the "Pennsylvania Railroad" book (1997, MBI Publishing Company, ISBN 0-7603-0379-7, pg 22), and "The American Railroad" (1999, MBI Publishing Company, ISBN 0-7603-0512-9, pg 42).

The Kato model was the first high-quality N-scale steam locomotive when it was released in 1996. It features a beautiful mechanism, solid performance, and quiet motor and gears. On the downside, it doesn't pull much weight (installation of the traction tire kit helps), and it seems to bind on curves with a radius of 13 inches or less. Externally it doesn't quite resemble the PRR L1 class locomotives. An upgrade kit from GHQ will fix that (the kit is, unfortunately, out of production - and I never got one). The photo below shows the model as it originally came from Kato, with none of the changes documented here applied.