Has any history book been written about any specific locomotive model (diesel)?
With lots and lots of pictures. Prototype and production.
Yes.
Editor Emeritus, This Week at Amtrak
There have been books on Geeps (GP series) F Units and E units and probably others. There have been books on steam such as the Mikado (2-8-2) and others. Also GG-1 electrics
Yes, but it's probably more common -- with diesels -- to see books written about a particular era of production or 'family' of locomotives from a particular builder. So, for example, a book like "Mister D's Machine" would concentrate on the history of early EMD power, taking up switchers, passenger power, Fs and BLs and GPs together, and a history of FM would include more than, say, just Train-Masters or Erie-builts. It's probably common sense even in the railfan press to increase the number of prospective 'buyers' with this kind of inclusion, particularly with both new and used book prices at the levels they are today -- both for successful books and unsuccessful 'remainders' ...
More specific information on particular classes might be found in the 'pamphlet-size' (usually softcover) reference series, like the Train Shed Cyclopedias. (If I remember correctly, even 'The Remarkable GG1' was printed in softcover, like the Quadrant Press series including what I remember as the first collection of American streamlined steam in one place.)
I do not think the enthusiast community for diesels has gotten to the same 'place' as, say, the British modeling community that supports demand for a great many detail shots of a particular locomotive class. That's much more likely to show up for diesels as part of a superdetail article or thread on the Web than in some printed and distributed source that has to be marketed and sold.
O.K. Now that I have some replys. I am wondering about putting a book together, mostly a picture book, of the Baldwin Centipede. I haven't a clue as to how big of a market for such a book on a single model, as there were so few of the model made and even a fewer number of railroads that purchased it. I think I have a good source for them in action on the Seaboard Air Line, I'm sure quite a few can be had from Pennsylvania museums, I think finding some in service on the National De Mexico may be a bit more of a problem. I have seen the head on collision on the N de M on a google search. Would like a different angle of it though. Now what are your thoughts.
I'd go for it, but to make it work I think you'd need to go far beyond just a bunch of pictures. There is a great deal of fun behind the Centipede story, both good and bad, all of which would have to be in "the" book about this fairly unique approach to diesel power design. For instance, the original locomotive was designed to be 6000hp in a single unit - before WWII. With modular gensets (each driving an individual axle) no less. This considerably shorter, and with "higher-speed" (by contemporary standards) running gear, than alternatives... The original low-hp locomotive (with two 8-cyl engines making 'only' 3000 hp) had a special pony-truck design with long equalizer for high-speed stability ... likely a far higher speed than it would achieve with any substantial train weight; even with the N&W TE-1 Baldwin (or BLH for that matter) never did quite grasp the reality of constant horsepower and 'realizable' rather than theoretical speed.
Ye gods, what a job doing the wheels and the brakeshoes on one of those things! And what fun maintaining all the little hose connections and joints, and the electrical cabling lying in its trough in a fairly persistent oil bath - among other things, Ground Fault City and I dare you to find where it is with the tools the builder provided...
If you don't tap Will Davis for guidance and assistance you're missing something very important. That goes for documentation and 'ephemera' as well as the usual things.
I was looking at Will's site and it looks like he just stopped in 2014.
Where is he from? What does he do?
Jim F
jfreelan1964Where is he from? What does he do?
His 'other' hobby is old typewriters. His career was in aspects of nuclear engineering. His approach, and his achievements, in 'locomotive scholarship' are really pretty impressive, and if you have the chance to look some of them up I think you'll be intrigued.
Technically your oil cables laying in an oil bath wouldn't be that much of an issue, depending on the type of oil used. I know this from a computer that was designed a few years ago that would have been an enclosed case with everything surrounded by oil to keep it cool...no ground fault problems at all...don't recall what ever happened to it, but at least one was manufactured.
GERALD L MCFARLANE JRTechnically your oil cables laying in an oil bath wouldn't be that much of an issue, depending on the type of oil used.
You do realize I'm talking about cables that were designed and intended to be kept scrupulously dry, but wound up lying in troughs full of a mixture of leaked lube oil and coolant...
This is a bit like the 'overbuilt design' of a commercial-grade Trotter treadmill power supply in the '90s. The entire power board was enclosed in a milled-out recess inside a 'billet' aluminum block acting as a heat sink, up underneath the plastic 'hood' at the front of the machine. Since this was well out of the weather, and had the waterproof shell over it, this only had a sheet-metal cover over it to keep out dust. We started to get complaints after these machines were in service for several months; what we encountered was significant, sometimes tremendous corrosion and shorting of the board components and traces.
What was happening was that people would run on these things very, very hard ... and sweat. The sweat would drip down onto the treadmill belt, which was running backward past the person and reversing over the rear roller. As the belt came back up the treadmill on the 'bottom' side, the sweat would try to form droplets, and as the belt returned over the power roller in the front the droplets would be thrown UP against the bottom of the 'drip ledge' in that sheet-metal cover, and wick into the recess. Evaporation couldn't get it out again, so it would accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate ... until something broke.
This was the problem with the Baldwins -- the oil would affect the insulation on the cables in various ways, until there was sufficient 'shorting' to drop the ground relay on "something". Then you had to figure out where the ground fault was ... in the muck, without good circuit isolation or anything even remotely resembling a TDR. Fixing the ground fault would then be interesting, as one might expect most of the adjacent insulation on a given cable to be 'near' failure too, and a temporary repair with tape or wrapped gutta-percha or whatever would have to survive conditions 'back in the trough' until some sort of permanent repair, or cable replacement or whatever, could be made. It is unsurprising to me that there were often 'road failures' on these Baldwins that made them unsuitable for first-line scheduled passenger service, or even the sort of second-tier trains that the T1s were put on. It would be unsurprising to find that unanticipated maintenance personnel costs, similar to those for Metroliner 'riding maintainers' at various times, proved to be unpleasantly high (and promising to be nothing but increasing as the locomotives aged).
We might remember that the Centipedes were intended as "diesel T1 equivalents" just as a T1 was intended as a kind of GG1 equivalent. If they had been built with EMD's general level of reliability in detail design, they might have succeeded better than they did in fast passenger service; I don't think there was anything in the design or principle of the 608-A 625-rpm engines or Westinghouse power transmission that was inherently unreliable even at sustained high output.
Would have needed a better nose design to give the right 'customer appeal' to a Fleet of Modernism train, though!
BTW, gamers have been using oil immersion for mant years, and some companies (Puget comes to mind) have manufactured them. I had fun with a Mac motherboard in an aquarium tank full of baby oil (and a bunch of colored lights), perhaps the most elegant-looking way to achieve high heat transfer from overclocked processors or chips without high levels of noise. There was a company called Green Revolution Systems that implemented the approach ("CarnotJet") on a much grander scale. Much more is probably being done with the oil-immersion approach now.
TRAINS had an excellent article about the Centipedes some time in the 1980's. I will have to look to find the specific issue.
Jerry Pinkepank's article about Baldwin diesels in one of the all-diesel issues (1968 or 1969) implied that a lack of real quality control was a major problem for Baldwin diesels. He mentioned that the layout of the lube and electrical systems appeared to be designed separately from each other and that there seemed to be no standardized layout for the wiring. Oil leaks also were an ongoing problem.
It's not surprising that a fair number of Baldwin diesels were re-powered.
CSSHEGEWISCHJerry Pinkepank's article about Baldwin diesels in one of the all-diesel issues (1968 or 1969) implied that a lack of real quality control was a major problem for Baldwin diesels. He mentioned that the layout of the lube and electrical systems appeared to be designed separately from each other and that there seemed to be no standardized layout for the wiring. Oil leaks also were an ongoing problem.
The way I had the situation described to me was that Baldwin tried to build diesel locomotives with the same mentality they built steam. Individual customization by the customer or by the piece (with a separate manual for individual series or even locomotives; liquid systems connected by hoses to make fit between components less critical; electrical wiring run where convenient. Engines and chassis and traction motors intentionally overbuilt, castings used to minimize in-service distortion, etc. Service something left to the railroad shops to do, with only the bare minimum of specialized or patented components needing to be sourced 'overnight'. Contrast that with Dilworth, Kettering, et al. who understood, even if only at times on a sort of native-cunning level, what was needed to build locomotives that kept running and were supported well when they stopped running.
If you care enough to do the maintenance (and set up the procedures) you can get remarkable service out of Baldwins -- ask SMS. But, as with British motorcars in general, do not expect a Baldwin to show the attention to maintenance detail design. A similar argument might be made for Fairbanks-Morse OP engines, which had excellent design and good construction, but were not friendly to work on when a wide range of conditions raised their heads in 'middle age.'
Note that Baldwin quality control was not always particularly good - the general philosophy on, say, the ATSF Lanning Hudsons was to deliver 'em with defects and make arrangements to fix, or compensate the owning road for, whatever little peccadilloes showed up (holes where they shouldn't be, roller bearings out of tram, and so forth). That approach doesn't translate well into diesel-electric practice in a number of respects, and the 'cheapest possible construction' argument did not,. and does not, do very well against the EMD approach (with integrated finance and assured resale value sterilizing much of the higher list cost) or the later GE approach (guaranteed power over the life of the locomotive with hard remediation or prompt action if it fails).
In justice to Baldwin, much of their exit from locomotive design came when Westinghouse (their majority owner at the time, I believe) decided to exit the railroad traction equipment market. We might compare what Alco, a much more advanced locomotive builder, did in somewhat similar situation (when GE stopped being their joint partner in diesel-electrics in the early Fifties). Some of Will Davis' discussions about Alco control technologies show they were highly innovative, but all too often unsuccessful at keeping their sophisticated technologies actually running ... again, compared most starkly to EMD.
Did EMD "prevail" in the '50s and '60s because of its deep-pockets association with GM? Perhaps in part. I think GE succeeded in selling locomotives of interesting sophistication but flat awful build quality for many years because, in part, the locomotive division was associated with a larger company, too. If you needed parts, and you assuredly would sooner rather than later, there would likely be a GE around to furnish something to you.
With respect to the 'repower', it might be relevant that Cockerill successfully sold the 608-A engine technology very successfully in locomotives for many years. There was nothing really wrong with the engine except it turned too slowly to use commonly-available alternators or electrical control gear with it directly. (And the other builders at that point were all chasing higher power-to-weight than a slow-speed engine could produce, even Lima with their designed-for-maintenance inline engine optimized for lower unit horsepower.) And so if you wanted to keep the massive frame and big traction motors, you were going to be swapping an awful lot of components, whereas resetting the clock via a convenient 'trade-in' program (whether in name only or substantial) often meant lower cost for a better-supported (or supportable) locomotive family.
RME it might be relevant that Cockerill successfully sold the 608-A engine technology very successfully in locomotives for many years.
I am not familiar with Cockerill, can you elaborate?
jfreelan1964I am not familiar with Cockerill, can you elaborate?
They're a Belgian company that license-built the Baldwin engine (for overseas use) for quite a few years after Baldwin stopped making locomotives. You can google for some of the videos (just as much fun to hear Baldwin noise out of exotic-to-us European styled carbodies as it is to hear loud 567 music from those NOHABs) and to start getting some of 'the rest of the story' - see in particular Hank Rentschler's and Will Davis' posts in this thread on railroad.net
As an aside, can one of the marine-engine mavens tell me if the Cockerill V-16 of the early Seventies was derived from the BLH engine design 'in progress' when the decision to abandon further locomotive production was taken:
To someone who is still a bit upset that the 408 (and earlier 412) 'genset' engine development at Baldwin didn't pan out, it would be interesting to see if Baldwin had something workable as a second-generation powerplant 'going' in the middle '50s and after... and if this interesting engine derives, at least in part, from that work. (Be interesting to speculate on a 4000hp answer to the SD45 with a decent-length crank and no 'extra' fuel-hogging cylinders...)
This may sound like a dumb question.
I know there is a diesel manufacturer that builds new Alco engines, and other manufacturers models under license. I just can't think of the named company. Just wondering if they would even entertain the posibility of building Baldwin designs, spare parts business. Who know maybe they could improve without much trial and error.
That company is (interestingly) Fairbanks-Morse. I doubt that they would be interested in the 608, as niether it nor the 251 meet current emissions standards.
Know of a website where one can learn rather quickly about Slow, Medium and High speed diesel engines and what the differences are?
jfreelan1964Know of a website where one can learn rather quickly about Slow, Medium and High speed diesel engines and what the differences are?
There are a number. A good place, off the top of my head, to start would be the Paxman history pages. (Paxman was one of the original builders of high-speed railroad diesel engines, and there is some explanation of what separates a high-speed from a medium-speed engine in railroad use.)
The distinction varies a bit depending on what field you're looking at. In marine practice, for example, a medium-speed engine starts around 250rpm and goes all the way up to roughly 1000rpm. However, in locomotive practice this would imply that a GE FDL at 900rpm is medium-speed but 1050 is high speed, with the engine kept the same, and that is not so. Cummins puts the 'defining line' between medium and high speed at 1200rpm now.
Better to look at some of the details of construction to assess what 'family' a given engine should be put in. I have little doubt that in the 'old days' of engine design (pre-Ricardo Comet chamber, for example) the distinction between these terms was made at lower rpm points than nowadays.
Most diesel engines in locomotives are medium-speed, including anything derived from a Cooper-Bessemer FVL. The engines now specified for the Spirit and Charger locomotives (unquestionably 'high-speed' designs) are supposed to operate in railroad service at 1800 sustained peak rpm, and regularly ramp up and down through critical frequencies to reach that level. It will be interesting to see how well they do that... or how much 'derating' will be necessary to give reasonable service life or reliability.
Back to the book. I am thinking of making the book about the size of the Locomotive Cyclopedia Volume 2, but I don't think it will be any where as thick as that, or should it be more of the size as the Morning Sun series of books 8.5x11 in size.
I would expect the production cost to be higher for the 'Cyclopedia' format, particularly with the right paper and color reproduction. On the other hand, a portrait format will definitely compromise the size or orientation of pictures of so long a locomotive, or drawings/diagrams if you use them (and I think you should). You should get some preliminary cost estimates and decide whether your target market supports the expense of the larger and wider format -- I doubt you have the 'pockets' to print this book as a labor of love or subsidize 'remaindering' unsold copies at fire-sale price to various discount peddlers (only to watch prices soar on the 'rare book' market afterward).
Thus the crux of the whole issue. I can do this as a labor of love for myself and donate what I put together, when I die, to a museum, Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, as an example. What are the costs, what is my target audience, how big is the target audience, etc.? Does anybody know, what is the size of any given target audience? How does one find out? Who should I write to?
Lets start with this publication. What is the size of Trains magazine's audience?
Thanks
jfreelan1964Lets start with this publication. What is the size of Trains magazine's audience?
Look at the publication numbers that appear in every issue. The subscription numbers tell you copies that were read 'for sure'; to figure out the eyeballs from newsstand and store copies you would also need to know the return rate (which obviously wasn't known when the issue was printed, but is a bit inherent in the actual press run when considered over a long period of time). Kalmbach customer service might discuss this with you.
Look at similar figures for some of the other railroad publications, but note that much of the 'traditional' distribution has changed -- Extra 2200 South being a case in point and a cautionary tale at the same time.
There are a couple of Baldwin enthusiast groups and Web sites, and I'd have this discussion with them because I expect most of your prospective audience is there.
If the book is written purely as a historical discussion of a particular (and not commonly thought to be too successful) locomotive class, it will have a more restricted sale than a book with wider appeal. In the old days, you needed to buy a book to learn about esoteric material, or to have a reference or pictures at hand. Meanwhile (for reasons I won't discuss in depth) many of the more interesting pictures were either jealously guarded or used as a kind of profit center by photo traders -- and it would be killing a golden goose to put one of those images in a publication (you can imagine the reaction to distributing it via public posts or blogs that are then available via the Wayback Machine!)
Meanwhile, you're competing with the modern Internet for 'information retrieval', where most often you can either keep a link to the content or download images at reasonably good resolution "free". That may be increasingly true as the cohort of people who are interested in Centipedes continues to age, and start to lose the kind of disposable income that can purchase books as expensive as yours is likely to be. I do not really know how you produce a book that will interest or intrigue the 'younger cohorts' of people interested in railroading (and if you read some of the discussions over on RyPN there are plenty of them, and more coming, but they need guidance and nurturing) -- if you produce something that has all the information in one place, or contains material or insights that are previously unavailable, you are likely to increase prospective sales above just what a handsomely-illustrated picture book would manage. I can't think of anything short of a carefully-supported data-mining and management program that could predict what 'quadrants' would be best to cater to in determining target markets, and what choices in editing and production would facilitate the best return. And you're not (yet) likely to get the use of such horsepower at a reasonable rate. (With the current push to user-hostile SaaS, I'd say 'never' with some assurance!)
Of course, this is presuming you're considering either self-publishing or using some form of the vanity-press route. I'd be at least mindful of putting a package together to 'float' to a couple of the established railroad-book publishers, who have some of the market dynamic mapped out. They also have a good understanding of how demographics are changing, and perhaps how to 'play to the strengths' in emerging markets for this sort of material.
I and a co-author are far enough through most of the issues RME lays out very well. Here is the short version of the tale of the Rusty Dusty so far.
The project started out as a history of the Wenatchee-Oroville branch of the Great Northern Railway. Not the most obscure line the GN ever had, but one that ran through the wilds of central Washington in the dark of the night. We chose to expand the scope from the "this line" style typical of railroad books to encompas a summary history of other lines and railroads in eastern Washington, going back to 1862, despite the fact that the W-O was completed in 1914. That history was one context. Another context that we explored was how the railroad and the local economy effected each other. This is a huge, and important, subject area that most rail fan books ignore. The other big part of the book is operations. We had access to all employee timetables, so were able to document every change in the operating plan. My co-author worked as a brakeman on the line in the mid 1960's and I was a clerk at Wenatchee in the late 1960's so we each had personal knowledge of this time period when the timetable became less relevant to the actual operation. To make a long story short we ended up with two books, one of 150,000 words, entitled "Rusty Dusty" and the second of abut 200,000 words about John's 45 years on the GN BN BNSF at Spokane.
The writing and research was fun and interesting but the point is for other people to share it, and hopefully not loose our shirts in the process.
Our first thought was a university press. Washington has two; the University of Washington and Washington State University. WSU has a history of publishing railroad books, so we went to them. The Executive Editor was interested and helped us. Part of the University process is that they send the manuscript out to reviewers who critiqe the draft and recommend that WSU should or should not publish. We made lots of changes in response to this process. Next step is that the faculty publishing committee reviews and decides if they want to publish. They said no. This process took a year, but the books were the better for it. They suggested, and we agreed to split the material into two books.
I wanted to go the university route for three reasons. First, I believe that their label is both a stamp of approval and a recommendation of quality. Second, they have a marketing staff and process, so John and I did not have to deal with this side of the business. Third, they, as publisher took all of the business risk. We as authors would get 10% of net sales. That would be 10% of the cover price if WSU sold direct to the public, or 10% of 60% of cover price if they sold bulk to a retailer, say a hobby shop.
Now we had to either self publish or find an established railroad book publisher to take it on. Another long story short, they tend to specialize by subject matter or area. We did not fit. No deal.
I previously self published a book, and managed to break even but ended up throwing a lot of books away. Left with no choice we found a few guys willing to put up the production costs on a loan basis, our Angels.
There are two ways to publish, conventional - meaning a fixed press run, or print on demand - meaning one or two as orders come in. Conventional is more risky because you have to forecast demand. Print on demand is more expensive per unit, and photo quility seems less good.
I strongly recommend that you get a few, 6-12, reviewers to review your manuscript. In your case that would be someone who knows BLW as a manufacturer, a railroad mechanicl guy who had to keep them runing, and one or two non subject matter experts to help with logic and scope items. That is one of the smartest things we did since they pointed out all kinds of holes.
WSU recommended that we hire a editor. I was not convinced since I did well in writing in school and business. Since our vision was a book that would be first class in every way, we hired an editor. It was the best thing we could have done. She was not a subject matter expert and she found all sorts of logic errors and demanded further explanations of things that were perfectly clear to me. The book was much improved for her efforts.
We hired a layout person as well. It was necessary given the size of the book and the 200 or so maps and photos. You will probably not need an index, we did. Total of these expenses was about $10,000. Had we gone with WSU or a publisher, the publisher would have paid these, and the cost of the print run, and managed order fulfillment. If you self publish you have to do or contract for all of this, but you get all of the revenue.
Since the unit cost of conventional publishing declines as print run increases, deciding how many to print is an important decision, and your marketing plan should drive that decision. Our plan has two main components; Historical societies, and mass circulation magazine ads. I am a member of both the GN and NP historical societies, so I know about what their membership is. I estimated market penetration by % and converted that into books per group. I did the same for Trains and Classic Trains.
I also know that the GNRHS published a large and outstanding book about GN steam locomotives. They ran 3,000 copies for a membership of about 2200 had still have a few in stock some 4-5 years later. WSU was thinking about 2000 copies. The specialty publishers who were willing to talk, that is most of them recommended about 2000 copies. We are doing 2000 copies, which we got to by both methods of calculation. By the end of 2017 I can tell you how well we guessed.
Our market is first "GN people" as represented by GNRHS members. Some lesser percentage of 'NP people' will buy because of the geographic closeness of GN and NP, or they are interested in things Washingon State. I am hopeful we will get .5% of Classic Trains readers, but expect less of Trains, due to the age cohort issue RME discussed. If you do something like this recognize that you will have overlap, that is some NP members are also GN and some Trains subscribers are also Classic Trains subscribers. We plan to put a few books in local museums to expose the book to those who are interested in local history, but are not going to see our ads elsewhere. We plan to find hobby shops in both Spokane and the Puget Sound area to expose to those who are strongly model oriented.
My personal opinion is that your subject matter is more obscure, meaning fewer people will be interested in it, than in the W-O. You should consider how many you can sell, which you seem to be doing with this post. I went through my long explanation to give you both the logic I used and the recommendations of experienced publishers.
I think you will find less information about your subject, so your project will involve fewer words and less physical space. If I were to undertake your project I would be thinking of something about the physical size of Trains, say 64 pages plus or minus in increments of four pages. You need to figure out how much you can sell your product for, cost out your marketing program and decide how much economic risk you are willing to assume pursing your dream.
Mac McCulloch
Thanks Mac!!!!
That is the kind of knowledge I have been needing/wanting to know.
If I do it right (of course any way I do it, it is right) I think PRR and SAL BLW fans may go for it, not so sure NdeM fans will, unless they know english. No offence ment.
jfreelan1964I think PRR and SAL BLW fans may go for it, not so sure NdeM fans will, unless they know English.
Interesting point. Doing a colloquial Spanish translation of the text may not cost you too much, and you could then print this as a pamphlet to accompany the book at small cost. (You could make up the equivalent of pasteup and separations to print an actual Spanish-language version, especially if you take the print-on-demand route, but I think the cost of good registered multiple-color printing is still comparatively high for a press run, and you do NOT want to skimp on the picture quality.)
I think part of the 'mission' here is to find a way to make the subject interesting to more groups of people. That is a reason I would provide much more of the 'period' context in describing the context and some of the contemporary designs and approaches at the time the 'centipede' underframe was developed (for Essl's modular design) and afterward, even as some of Baldwin's other diesel development went to standard carbody and A-1-A truck construction. I'd also provide some of what Staufer used to call "from the men" about the human side of the things.
We may have gotten to the point in history and digital provision where some of the 'unseen classics' in photo-traders' collections might be brought out for reproduction (perhaps at smaller size or reduced resolution, with a link to the original content or a high-resolution online version provided).
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