What kind of engine was in the Lima 1000 Hp switcher? Was it 2 cycle or 4 cycle? If 4 cycle would it have been like an ALCO or Baldwin? If a 2 cycle would it have been like a EMD or Fairbanks Morse.
The Shark Nose question. Did they have dynamic brakes, or were they an option.
I am doing a private road Lima switcher and some Shark nose and wouldn't want to be too far off. Thanks for the reply.
The Lima diesel engines were Hamilton engines (remember they were Lima-Hamilton by that point). These were pretty good four-stroke engines for the day, designed to be robust in intended service, but a little short on horsepower and with very little prospective horsepower improvement, certainly not to second-generation power levels per cylinder. (It is my opinion that Lima was betting that Hamilton's free-piston engine would prove better for road-engine and high power density operations -- hence no development of better diesel engines than those needed for switchers and first-generation transfer power and road-switchers.)
Someone here can comment on how well the Hamilton engines did in Lima road-switchers in commuter service. I don't recall having read anything that said they were 'bad' and a couple of references that said the locomotives had remarkably carefully thought-out detail design in many respects. I always thought of the Hamiltons as being similar to Alco power, certainly much closer to it than to any of the production 600 and 600A tugboat-derived engines in the Baldwins, or certainly to the Winton/EMC/EMD two-strokes. The Cooper-Bessemer engine of course is quite different in a couple of key respects, most notably the way the piston rods are arranged.
Dynamic brakes were an option on the Sharknoses. They were not ordered on the PRR BP20s, where they might have been most useful of all. I do not remember (if I indeed really knew) the spotting features for DB in the later cab and B units, but there are references that discuss them.
The PRR Shark rebuild/repower project made everything 'inside' above the deck essentially equal to a RS-18, so you could package the various appurtenances on an RS18 with dynamic to suit... Problem was it was a very expensive, hard-to-see-out-of RS18, at the time single-unit power was following the example of the RSD7 or better...
To be specific the engine was a Hamilton T-89-SA 4 stroke 1000 HP engine.
Caldreamer
T-89-SA was really a 1200hp engine (turbocharged and intercooled) as early as 1948.
An introduction to it courtesy of the delightful Will Davis is here:
http://railroadlocomotives.blogspot.com/2014/06/lima-hamilton-diesel-locomotives.html?m=1