I suspect the problems with the remaining PRSL Baldwins were related to Ecolaire and Harry Rentschler stopping key parts availability after 1970. There were engines with Westinghouse 'legacy' motors that soldiered on later than the mid-Seventies, weren't there?
PRSL's last four AS16s were built for Reading with electric MU and dynamic brakes, but not accepted for delivery. The PRSL removed the DBs from the short hood, put in a boiler, changed the MU to Baldwin pneumatic and regeared them for 80 MPH.
The PRSL's 1970s problems with Baldwins stemmed more from the Westinghouse electricals than from the 608A engines. Westinghouse stopped supplying electrical parts to B-L-H and F-M sometime in 1955. Spare parts were still available by the 1970s but had become expensive.
Miningman End of the Line
End of the Line
To be fair, 6024 doesn't really look anything like 6013 because the very last Baldwin roadswitchers had taller hoods than the great majority built earlier. This made them look very much more like the intermediate FM units (after most of the Loewy windows and fillets had gone) than the Baldwins that preceded them. Had Baldwin kept building for another ten years, these would have been more familiar.
Peter
My favorite spotting feature for the Train Master is the arched roof line, the Baldwins have a flat roof.
My spotting feature for the Trainmaster is the high end platforms at the same hight as the cab floor. Also 6 axles.
Actually Becky, that's not a Train Master, it's a Baldwin, but I can understand the mistake. Most roadswitchers look alike anyway. It took me years to spot the differences and even now I'm not sure on some!
Old Train Masters never die, they just fade away?
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Well then...Just as stated, only appeals to railfans. All the Madison Ave. marketing in the world would not convince folks that the unkempt Baldwin and a single old coach was a great travel adventure or an advanced way to get to Atlantic City.
Wish I had taken it though!
6013 was delivered in green. BTW the PRSL didn't own the P70s, they still belonged to PRR's West Jersey & Shore (PRSL leased them).
rcdrye6013 is a 1600 HP AS-16 (geared for 80 MPH!)
Don't ask me where that AS-12 typo came from: PRSL never had those.
Pity this wasn't a few short years earlier: this is one of the justly-famed Green Hornets, I believe. Plenty fast, and plenty hot. Here she is then:
http://www.godfatherrails.com/images/slides/1954_07/30-PRSL6033HammontonNJ072454gf.jpg
They would not care about the P-70 but it would be comfortable sitting and a comfortable ride. In the early '70s these could still be found on the Philadelphia clockers, and their ride quality and comfort were astounding compared to the other equipment. Of course you had to be prepared for the sort of half-light illumination and bronze seat frames and purplish plush, a bit funereal... but if you needed a nap at 80mph or better, you could get one. My guess is that the public wasn't expecting either an AOE or a Metroliner... and would like that coach once they were sitting in it.
Now if you want something to deplore, look at some of the North Jersey options in that general era... I love the principles of rattan seats but not once they get rott-an.
Lots of railcars and doodlebugs had some version of tiger stripes -- considering the Boston-rocker exposure of the engineer or whatever you call the driver of one of those things, that was a reasonable sort of precaution, although adding a tasty touch of ghastliness to many a gas-electric already looking like it was contrived by a grave-robbing relative of good Dr. Viktor.
For some reason, unaccountable to me now, I never actually rode one of the things east of Lindenwold. Folks I trusted claimed the trains got over 90mph at times, and even if that were based only on the notoriously-Italian-style-optimistic RDC speedometers it would have likely seemed pretty quick.
Yes, I believe replaced by this:
The public of course would not know a P70 coach from a hole in the ground.
Far cry from the Blue Comet days for sure. A grimy dirty burbling Baldwin pulls up with a single coach and you're standing there with Mom and the kids looking forward to a day of fun and excitement .. not a good start.
looking at the above pic it appears the more curious got a good view of what's ahead although one or two must be engineer and crew.
The striping looks like a hurried afterthought.
6013 is a 1600 HP AS-16 (geared for 80 MPH!) Dual control with the "good" 608A engine. PRR class BS-16ms ("m" = MU, "s"=steam boiler)
Miningman Only a railfan would find this exciting. The public sure would not.
Only a railfan would find this exciting. The public sure would not.
It's not the Atlantic City Railroad of the great days when the fastest and most glamorous of the world's locomotives handled that route; it's not a Nellie Bly and surely not a Blue Comet. But it gets the right job done for its present clientele... and would as long as Ecolaire had the parts and the equipment trust kept running.
If I remember correctly, what replaced it was RDCs, likely a step down for the pax in most respects. Might have been interesting had PRR/PC kept going just a couple of years, into the casino era...
More Devolution
Pennsylvania Reading SeaShore Lines
It's amazing, the things that would be possible using today's technologyif we had some of yesterday's circumstances. Take any of the 'waves' of construction, from the Adams Windsplitter train through the early high-speed motor trains, to the idea of the early stressed-skin Pendulum cars, and then the lightweights of the '50s built with automotive NVH attenuation instead of bus-like cheapness, right up through UA and LRC factor, and yes, including the SPV with workable drivetrain and APU, and apply a little modern materials and manufacturing, even of the order we could tap for the New London Bus project.
The United States is even beginning to come off the enormous static buff and draft requirements, in part acknowledging that 'controlled-crush' and CEM can do much of the safety provision. The near-immediate problem, though, is that in many recent accidents (specifically including 501 in Washington) the crash involved so much unpredictable energy in unpredictable ways that it isn't likely best-practices CEM would have helped make the lightweight structures truly more surviveable.
I got around this 'in the old days' by keeping people in proper position in their seats and providing a proportional 33" or so of deceleration relative to a passenger's immediate surroundings. This is what provides full braking without contact, if the shell 'stops short' from about 225mph, without causing high-speed aortic shear (the thing that killed Diana) or other obvious deceleration 'morbidity'. At least theoretically, the sort of 'passenger pod' that provides semiprivate reclining 'sleeper' accommodation can be made reasonably proof against accident trauma with some care (and strategic air/fluid 'bag' provisions) -- I say theoretically because in the airframes where this was tried, including the F111 and XB70, there were still fatalities in misdeployment.
With a properly adjusted model for onboard and 'reservation-filling' food service, it ought to be possible to provide a good luxury-train experience with 'hospitality-trained' staff willing to work 'away cruises' for the right incentives. Food need not be expensive to be good, but if it needs to be expensive, the 'novelty of having it on the move' won't substitute for care ... the good news being that with convection and sous vide there may be greater options for choices to be served at or near one's accommodations instead of as a high-overhead sit-down venue reached by extensive walking past prospectively infected folks...
Could be an interesting and in many ways better brave new world...
Yeah, it's too bad it fizzled out , now it's all catch up with a lot of the builders and even the technology foreign.
This current state of affairs maybe yet another set back. Probably will be, funding will not be a priority.
It is however an opportunity for radical design and engineering advances in on board ventilation and seating, even boarding and service.
MiningmanThank you for that rcdrye. Side by side with the Bullet Train I think there is no doubt the public would perceive this as ridiculous beyond belief yet there it is.
It does have to be said that there was an attempt to throw money at innovative passenger service in the United States, in the Johnson Administration from 1965 to 1968, and one could argue that if it had extended to some fairly easily predictable track- and new-route-related things we'd have had 50-mph-plus Metroliners and Turbotrains, good RTG-shell-related options, and fast diesel MU trains to make more of a difference. Unfortunately the 'public' attitude toward passenger was much the same as toward commuter: do it at least cost, and emphasize better long-distance roads on the one hand and transition to SSTs on the other.
It was disturbing to me that by 1967 with all the supertrain work going on there was no place for an American Orient Express level in the East even with historic names and the fastest timing ever achieved. See how Perlman valued the concept even to the end! See how commoditization came to fill the void even with government-level participation and inherent subsidy...
Thank you for that rcdrye. Side by side with the Bullet Train I think there is no doubt the public would perceive this as ridiculous beyond belief yet there it is.
Someone was being pressured to keep the finger firmly pressed on the NO button.
This Covid crisis has exposed many things but one that I find most eye brow raising is how trillions of dollars can be raised out of nothingness.
..so there is zero doubt in my mind that the powers that be and the railroads themselves wanted all the way out of passenger with no thought at all to the benefit of society as a whole but only to enhance their own filthy lucre.
They got their twin $25,000 fridges stocked to the nines with chocolate ice cream, a walled off estate and armed security.
The devolution continues.
Many of the PC E-units in Amtrak service up to about 1974 still belonged to PC, and were only leased. Despite their worn paint jobs, most of them were mechanically sound and fairly well-liked by the crews. The kicker was that several PC lines still required special cab signal or ATC equipment that was far from universal on the equipment that Amtrak owned. SDP40F and F40PH deliveries, along with the "cab signal from hell" developed for the SDP40F, and applied to many of the Amtrak-owned E-Units allowed Amtrak to drop the use of the leased units.
The "hole" in the nose near the headlight is really just a paint failure around the MU receptacle cover.
Nonetheless , thanks for the thoughtful replies on the second set of pics.
Well that's the point.. its so corny and dumb it makes that the funny part!
MiningmanHere : this is good for a laugh, at least I did and I haven't felt much like laughing lately.
That is pretty sad. There are better parodies of the JDM/drifting sounds out there. (Especially for the NSX, which isn't anyone's ricer car...)
And someone dubbed in air tools instead of supercharged V8 sound.
Jones-- One can talk and talk about this vast discrepancy and rationalize every which way but in the end it's an embarrassment. A solid private public partnership was in order but it never came.
Here : this is good for a laugh, at least I did and I haven't felt much like laughing lately. Already sent this to you via email so it's more for the rest of the beloved wahoos on this Forum.
https://imgur.com/gallery/a0pXqvG
You have to turn on the sound on the clip independently.
Just ask my bird friend how he feels about things these days.
https://youtu.be/m0z-0ZyQ-48
Miningman I kinda looked like that when I got up this morning.
I kinda looked like that when I got up this morning.
Meanwhile...
Jones 3D Modeling Club https://www.youtube.com/Jones3DModelingClub
Miningman1) Penn Central #15 Cleveland - Cincinnati 1968 Good Grief!
This comes when the government orders you to run a train, but won't give you any money to do it right. Why have amenities when they lose you money every trip, or food service when it loses you money every trip, or even run a higher-speed passenger locomotive when it would lose you money every trip, on a train that won't even come close to requiring even a coach worth of seats ... and loses money every trip?
Probably on the specific route of the X-Plorer, which also bled money every trip. I give them full points for trying; that route should have been one of the places 'corridor' service would have provided a useful and valuable rail opportunity.
In the interests of fair disclosure: I'd have put an RDC on this, torn out a bunch of seats, and put in a self-serve bar and food service. Perhaps pulled some of those fold-out Sleepy Hollow style chairs out of a long-distance coach and put 'em where someone might find them of value...
2) Penn Central 'Spirit of St. Louis' 1968 Do you really need 2 E's?
The answer to this is really implicit in Mark Twain's comment about whether the 2 Es can keep a secret...
3) Amtrak #363 Westbound St. Clair Mar. 7/74 @ Wayne, Michigan
It's a funny thing. I had lots and lots of experience with PC dip-black Es in abominable white-smoking condition going out of Harmon. But this is the first time, the very first time, I can recall seeing one that looks physically depressed at its prospects.
4) The St. Clair again, Amtrak Oct. 26/74 in Detroit at the Michigan Central Station
The actual train back there doesn't really look quite so bad. One does have to speculate how much of that locomotive's appearance is due to Detroit hoydens and their rocks and cinderblocks. It was so bad in places in the East around then that bars were being bolted to windshields to keep the crews alive.
5) Not Passenger but here is a look at Penn Central in its brief existence on the CASO. May 22/72 Windsor, Ontario
They didn't deserve it, and really couldn't do anything with it; neither did struggling early Conrail. So they gave it to Canadians, who certainly did know what 'they' wanted to do with it, and that's exactly what they did. Murderers all.
From magnificence in engineering to winning two wars to yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today!
Or, when the money runs out we can't keep pretending to play trains.
Which is really about what happened with all those traction lines, and all those branch lines, and all the vast and wondrous service at both Ashtabula and Port Burwell ... and right down to what's happening in the Ottawa area. When even governments pass on the ability to run trains because it costs too much for any perceivable benefit ... and you can't get dedicated volunteers to run it like a bigger version of Strasburg ... it may be time to let it go until such time as a democracy recognizes it wants its service back.
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of what's pictured here, though.
Pic #3 complete with drooping eye lids and a mortar shell through the front. Good grief how sad!
GS
Reminds me of a line Walter Lord wrote about the ending of transportation eras:
"...the railroads sagged into decrepitude like a Bowery bum."
Man, that just said it all.
1) Penn Central #15 Cleveland - Cincinnati 1968 Good Grief!
From magnificence in engineering to winning two wars to yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today !
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