CNJ Babyfaces tied up at Scranton

[081552]

I think I posted this ten years ago (?) but I still think it's a cool photo.

 

[Miningman]

It is definitely a cool picture. It represents so much...the failed hopes of a great builder, the all to short period of prosperity after WWII for the railroads with all their good intentions, the passing of an era that came and went before we could even get a handle on it.  The loss of industry and soon the railroad itself. 

Baldwin built some tough looking units thats for sure. A nice A-B-A match to boot.  By the way it's CNJ not CN"G". 

Wish I could hear those engines idling or getting its train underway. How long after this photo did those babies get the torch? Were they re-engined by another builder (EMD?) at this point or were they still burbling Baldwins? 

[081552]

Ha! typo corrected!

Somebody can probably date the photo by the cars.

[Firelock76]

As far as I know none of the CNJ's Baldwins were ever re-engined, when the CNJ had gotten all they could out of them they were disposed of.

[MidlandMike]

I'm guessing the track in the foreground is DL&W

[BaltACD]

081552

I think I posted this ten years ago (?) but I still think it's a cool photo.

The decaying stature of the 'station facility' in the background is indicative of the financial issues that CNJ faced and brought about it's demise as a flag of record.

[081552]

I sent this photo to a CNJ guru in 2004 to ID. Here's his comment.That photo is of an A-B-A set of Baldwin "Babyfaces" tied up in Scranton as seen from the DL&W tracks. The building with the cone tower on top of the hill is (was) the CNJ/NYO&W freight station (note the box car). It still stands today and is supposed to be incorporated into the Steamtown National Park in Scranton.

[RME]

MidlandMike

I'm guessing the track in the foreground is DL&W

Unless I'm mistaken, the picture is taken from a bridge that is now 'wall-to-wall Alcos' associated with the Delaware Lackawanna, the lead up to what is now Steamtown NPS (to the right and behind the photographer's position).

The station with the 'conical hat' was still there in mid-2015, and I doubt it will be lost.

Best way to date it is to look at the vehicles by the 'Maid Rite Steak Co." at upper left.  I would say early 1960s, backed up by the fact that the Maid Rite company itself was founded in 1960.

[Miningman]

RME- Do you know of the ultimate fate of these units? How long were they in service? From everything I've read on Baldwin baby face locomotives they were not very sucessful and spent a great deal of time in the shop. Were the bugs worked out by this time or did CNJ ( and NYC) just keep patching them up and using them up. They could not have been around too much longer after this photo. 

[rcdrye]

I can't find the final dates of operation, but if my memory serves me correctly they were traded in on EMD SD35s in 1965.

They were actually owned by CRR of Pa.  "A"s 70-79, "B"s K,L,M,R,S

[RME]

Miningman

Do you know of the ultimate fate of these units? How long were they in service? From everything I've read on Baldwin babyface locomotives they were not very successful and spent a great deal of time in the shop.

I think rcdrye is correct in what happened to them.  My limited experience with Baldwins in general was that, for roads that had little choice in getting new power to replace them, they were kept running until their parts provision arrangement ran out (20 or 25 years) and then rebuilt, traded in, or scrapped. 

The fundamental problem was not so much that they were 'shop queens' as they were designed by a steam-locomotive builder with steam-locomotive detailing.  Every manual I have seen reinforces the idea that each locomotive was an individual piece, with its own maintenance updates, fixes and features that might apply only to it. 

Meanwhile instead of hardlines or, better yet, cored passages between firmly bolted-up components, Baldwin used lots of little rubber hoses to avoid problems with vibration or differential heating.  So oil and coolant dribbled everywhere -- total loss lubrication is accepted on steam, but on a diesel there are problems.  Now run all the power wiring neatly in closed channels ... under the floor, where you can't hang it up or stub your toe while fixing all the fluid leaks.  Under the floor where the oil, fuel, and coolant run by gravity, and can't get out.  One of the most difficult issues on a diesel is the unlocatable ground fault -- puts the unit out of service, keeps the unit out of service, and when it turns out you have to continuity-test all those wires pickling in the soup, you will often not be as happy as when you started.  Many years ago there were some comments from a NYC crew that had one of these things -- might even have been one of the Gerties, but I remember it as a B-B cab unit -- on a branch line.  They would stop on a bridge at one point to fish, and hear and watch the drip-drip-drip into the stream from wherever the low or leaking points were.

Now, there was little wrong with the electrical gear, except that Westinghouse (which at this point had control of BLH) decided to exit the rail equipment field.  There was little wrong with the 600A-series engine design (Cockerill went on with it overseas for some time) except that it couldn't be jiggered to make much more hp than it already did in Baldwins -- you couldn't spin it any faster, and you couldn't boost it up much more, and it already had all the ballast weight you could want, and more, in its structure already.  There have been proposals here and there (Matthew Imbrogno coming up with a couple of good ones) to bring back the idea of slow, highly-efficient engines for reliable restricted-horsepower applications, but the future belongs to modified Tier 4 final truck-engine technology.  (On the flip side, it is difficult to dislike a locomotive that happily accelerates to over 25mph light with the engine at idle...)

It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Baldwin had had a more systematic approach to build quality than, say, EMD.  But as far as I can tell, they never did ... even the late manuals I've seen have all had separate modification documentation.  I saw one of the last PRSL AS-16s on a dead line at Morrisville in the mid-'70s, and by that time the water pump was driven by what looked like about 20 ordinary little V-belt fan belts in parallel.  How you tensioned them all correctly I have no idea, but it couldn't possibly be a good idea no matter how redundant the arrangement seemed to be, or how cheap the belts were when one went bad.

The best of all Baldwins, the BP-20s, lasted very late as Baldwins, or indeed any early non-EMD passenger locomotive at all, went, in a particularly demanding service.  I have written here about the reminiscences of one engineer who ran them: he said it was normal to watch the ammeter go up into the red and peg, I think at 2000A, and accelerate the train until 30 to 35 sec. later it would sag back into range.  Repeat this at each stop going down to Bay Head or wherever, and then lather, rinse, repeat on the trip back.  And they did this until 1966.  So there is nothing really wrong with a Baldwin when you can control maintenance to them (the same being true for GG1s while Wilmington was working on them).  It is difficult to imagine, though, that they would have lasted as long, or perhaps done as well, a couple of years into the PC era...

[rcdrye]

The CNJ freight Baldwins didn't have the 608A engine which was reasonably robust.  They had the earlier 608SC, which had a bunch of issues including a supercharger that tended to "soup", collecting unburned fuel while the SC was catching up, resulting in smoke, flames and occasional explosions.  The MU control was also at least partly pneumatic and wouldn't mate with anything except another Baldwin, and not even all of those (something about hose placement...).  The BP20 was basically a pair of derated S12 switchers, in the same way an E8 was a pair of SW7s.  Baldwin got the cooling right on those, unlike the earlier baby-face carbodied units.  The NdeM's centipedes and some DRS-6-6-1500s got some fixes for the "soup" problem and revised plumbing, which is why they lasted as long as they did.  Of course the fixes were too late to save Baldwin's product line.  Seaboard ordered all of its Baldwins with GE-style MU, which allowed SAL to mix them with other units in later years.

[Miningman]

Thanks for the information fella's. Somewhere amoungst the quantum universe is one scenario where Baldwin continued on with great success. 

The BP-20's were stunning looking locomotives and gave good account of themselves. Unfortunate that no other railroad ordered some. They would look real good as GM&O, UP, NYC,...can you picture a Great Northern BP-20?