It was built by ALCO's Richmond works in 1926 as an F-19 class 4-6-2 "Pacific" type to be used to pull the Chesapeake and Ohio's secondary passenger trains.

It spent several years in storage in Huntington, West Virginia, until 1968, when it was donated to the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) acquired multiple 4-6-2 "Pacific" and 4-8-2 "Mountain"-type locomotives for use in pulling their heavy passenger trains.

490 was the first locomotive of the class, and it was initially assigned to pull mainline trains on flat portions of the C&O system east of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Concurrently, C&O president Robert R. Young began designing a new steam-powered passenger train to demonstrate coal as an alternative to diesel power.

[1] The train was planned to be called the Chessie, and it was to be mainly hauled by M-1 class steam turbine locomotives between D.C. and Cincinnati.

[2] The C&O also decided to rebuild their F-19 locomotives as 4-6-4 "Hudsons" to haul the Chessie feeder trains out of Newport News, Virginia and Louisville.

Following a major coal strike in 1949, the C&O's newest president, Walter J. Tuohy, began to dieselize the C&O's operations, with EMD E8s being ordered to cover their passenger trains.

490 operated under its own power, as it hauled the final scheduled steam-powered passenger train on the C&O in April of that year before it was retired.

The last remaining L-1 would slowly deteriorate as a result of being exposed to the elements, but museum volunteers have given the locomotive one cosmetic repaint in the early 1990s.