The name comes from the locomotive's first service with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway beginning in 1941, where it was used to haul loaded coal trains over the Allegheny Mountains.

[3] Although it was apparent to many knowledgeable people in the railroad industry that reciprocating piston driven steam locomotives might soon be replaced by diesel power, Lima and C&O set out to build the ultimate in high power steam locomotives and they succeeded.

The calculated starting tractive effort was only 110,200 lbf (490.2 kN), but no one has published a higher dynamometer horsepower for any steam locomotive.

With one at the front and another at the back, 11,500-ton coal trains left Hinton, West Virginia, and were at full throttle from White Sulphur Springs to the top of the grade at Alleghany.

The train crews that worked with the H-8s, who were getting paid based on the locomotive's weight on the driving wheels at the time, started seeing this misrepresentation as an attack on their livelihood.

One H-8, the 1642, suffered a crown sheet failure and subsequent boiler explosion at Hinton, West Virginia, in June 1953.

While these locomotives had two sources of water for the boiler, a steam turbine pump-fed Worthington hot pump and one injector, it is not known whether any were defective at the time of dispatch.

According to the family of the locomotive's engineer, Wilbur H. Anderson, of Hinton, previous crews had complained of a faulty water level gauge.