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Classic Railroad Quiz (at least 50 years old).

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Posted by Miningman on Monday, June 27, 2016 12:50 PM

However, we still have questions 1) the streamlined 2-6-0's 2) the builders plate on the BP-20 3) Redeye's query on UP painting practice re:Pennsy? 

Too bad about the RF-16 B unit As there are 2 surviving A's, no? 

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Posted by Miningman on Monday, June 27, 2016 12:06 PM

Well thank you yet again Overmod. Good reading in all that. Very informative, fascinating and necessary to know. I suppose my point was not so much on technical "issues" one as much as an entire direction for the future ( the images portrayed in their calendar covers and press releases for the public) all conveyed a "look", a specific identity. This was all abondoned very quickly and left us all with a "what the..?" to ponder. In a post years ago a knowledgable fellow put forth that somewhere between 55-70 million dollars was wasted on duplex drives. I too believe the T!'s were "fixable" and perhaps they should have "used them up" as they say on the farm. We can throw the baby face Baldwins ( essentially RF-16's), Centipedes and FM C Liners in the same boat Along with a select few others. Were there that many bad engineering, poor design and construction flaws at Baldwin? GM conspiracy theories? How could the mighty Pennsy be the one this happens to? I know it's been all talked to death over and over with opinions all over the map. Bottom line is : it was an incredible downfall. Next stop Penn Station destruction and Penn Central fiasco. 

Whatever really happened, it happened, ... and there is nothing left of any of it, save for a pair of ex NYC Sharknoses stashed away in a barn somewhere. 

 

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Posted by Overmod on Monday, June 27, 2016 5:30 AM

Miningman
It's hard to shake the image of all those locomotives lined up dead at Crestline like so much junk, Q2's, T1's, then the freight Baldwin sharknoses RF-16. The Q1, S1 and S2 as well but they were one of's. The others were fleet failures really. A corporate identity and the future severely dealt with.

The RF16 Sharks were not so much failures as 'dead ends'.  Had Baldwin not stopped building domestic power when Westinghouse (which controlled them at the time) decided to get out of the diesel-electric 'transmission' business, there might have been a longer future for them (as there was for the NYC counterparts).  

(I am still kicking myself for not buying the B-unit with Alco conversion all the years it sat there at the breaker...)

The Q2s were not 'failures' so much as obsolescent as soon as the War was over.  As soon as Clement decided to standardize on Fs after 1946, anything that went through water as fast as that and made horsepower higher than permitted speed limit for freight was not part of the future ... and the Qs had a bunch of specialized maintenance requirements that made them more expensive to keep running than the Js.  "Icing on the cake" was the boiler steel problems, particularly the discovery that external corrosion (from faults in the lagging, perhaps exacerbated by air-quality issues in the area) would eat through something like 3/4" of plate in no more than a couple of years... whoops! when the Korean War traffic comes along and you might have a use for them again.

T1s, as noted elsewhere, "had to die" in order to get more diesels approved.  I suspected this years ago, because it's not all that hard to fix most of the 'issues' with them even with contemporary 1948 technology, and others have done significant scholarship on the question since.  It probably wasn't a mistake to rush the 50 engines into production at the time the decision was made, although it certainly became one no more than a few months later; ask yourself 'how do we get out of a very expensive equipment trust now that our profitability is falling like a stone' and see what develops -- whether or not John Bohon is accurate in saying most people who ran them did not like them.

The S1 was never a good answer to a question the Pennsylvania ever actually asked.  It was scheduled for preservation, but the amount of its scrap value -- which looks comparatively small expressed in dollars, but was the equivalent of about a million dollars in today's money, was significant at the time both to help with the balance sheet and permit quicker effective dieselization.

The Q1 was a bit like the K5 in that it was a 'logical' expansion of the M1 to an incrementally larger size.  (Remember that the M1 was originally conceived as having 80" drivers, which would have been something of a mistake, and 77" drivers especially with duplex drive was similarly 'overkill' for any PRR freight and M&E engine).  Likewise the S2 was a technology demonstrator, and its 4-8-4 follow-on was still recognized by Westinghouse as a possibility as late as 1948 ... but nobody was buying it, just as nobody bought the double Belpaire and Franklin type C.  It is amusing to see how quickly the 'official' PRR line on direct rod drive turbines changed after all the staybolts unraveled.  In any case, I consider the V1 turbine a much better solution, even if it didn't have as much charm...

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Posted by rcdrye on Sunday, June 26, 2016 6:52 PM

Did PRR put the stripes and decals on the body?  UP got units in primer gray, or just unlettered for many years.

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, June 26, 2016 5:19 PM

Thanks for the information Overmod. Nice to hear that some thought of the BP-20 in a favourable light and with reason. It's hard to shake the image of all those locomotives lined up dead at Crestline like so much junk, Q2's, T1's, then the freight Baldwin sharknoses RF-16. The Q1, S1 and S2 as well but they were one of's. The others were fleet failures really. A corporate identity and the future severely dealt with. 

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Posted by Overmod on Sunday, June 26, 2016 2:35 PM

Miningman
"Edging out by a nose" ...now that's funny! Poor GG1 all rounded off like that. Performance wise, not even close however.

Actually there wasn't that much wrong with the BP20's performance.  R.J.Russell, a Metroliner engineer in the early '70s, had an interesting story about these in heavy commuter service on the Bay Head line.  "Normal practice" when starting was to watch the ammeter run over and peg (at 2000A if I remember the tale correctly) where it stayed for maybe a minute and a half as the train accelerated.  Then it would come sagging back down off the pin.  This would be repeated at most if not all the stops going down from Perth Amboy and then back up again.  This says something about the Westinghouse hexapoles and probably about the main generator windings (Louis Newton didn't think much of Westinghouse main generators, but it appears he got a pair of bad ones...)  And these were almost 20-year-old locomotives at the time.

625rpm maximum diesel-engine rpm on a 100mph locomotive was an interesting thing, too.

Problem was more in the build quality - there were a thousand little detail things with hoses connecting hard lines, belt-driven auxiliaries, cables in troughs in the floor that would fill with oil and coolant leaked from all the hoses and stuff ... not as bad as the Gravel Gerties on NYC, which probably get the Oscar for the worst passenger diesels, but not up to EMD standards, either.

Not to take anything away from the GG1, of course.  I do confess I'd like to have seen the proposed GG2, which would probably have been like a 'stretch' DD2 with 6 428-A twin motors and a higher permitted speed rating (for the electrification west of Harrisburg and the 9400' tunnel under Horse Shoe).  And the specs mentioned pushers/snappers with four-axle underframes, operating in pairs -- like a Centipede without constant-horsepower limitation...

 

Turning to the question: no, Juniata wasn't building diesel power for builders in that era, or contracting out finish work as they do now.  They certainly could have (GG1s are probably harder in detail) and that is related to the answer.

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, June 26, 2016 1:11 PM

Google searches keep referring to a dishwasher model. I'm restricted here by our colleges filter and access to certain things. 

I'll hazard a guess, which is likely very wrong. They were built in the Juanita/Altoona Shops and carry a plate that says so.

Very handsome engine's ...stunning. The future looked bright with those shark noses and T1's. How quickly and horribly it all went downhill in what was all too brief a time. Blink and it's gone.  

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, June 26, 2016 12:52 PM

"Edging out by a nose" ...now that's funny! Poor GG1 all rounded off like that. Performance wise, not even close however. 

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Posted by Overmod on Saturday, June 25, 2016 6:35 AM

While we are waiting for more 2-6-0 thoughts, here's a quick one:

PRR shops has this interesting builder's picture:

But why do they, and not Baldwin, have it?

Hint: they have a legitimate claim

 

(BTW (rather than BLW?) this is also my nomination for the 'Railroad Oscars' best paint scheme, edging out the 5-stripe GG1 by a nose)

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Posted by Miningman on Wednesday, June 22, 2016 11:30 PM

Crickets! .. We are slipping away into the summer doldrums.. I'm so busy right now marking papers, commencement speeches, grad parties, submitting marks, meetings meetings and more meetings for next fall.. I'm free as a bird starting next week and can participate more.

Yes those class B17 were very cool. Really enjoyed the pics of those Milwaukee streamlined North Woods Hiawatha's. Man oh man we have just lost too much looking back. 

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Posted by Overmod on Monday, June 20, 2016 4:22 PM

Miningman
Aw for cripes sakes and a half...got my wheel arrangement wrong, pretty bad I would say!

But those B17/5s are sooooooooooooooooooooo cool!

Truth to tell, I'd have had much more fun making that the question - what other railroad known for high-speed passenger service had hand-fired streamlined 4-6-0s?  (Of course, it is not very far from that to mentioning who has the world speed record for hand-fired streamlined power...Sad)

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Posted by Miningman on Monday, June 20, 2016 10:31 AM

Aw for cripes sakes and a half...got my wheel arrangement wrong, pretty bad I would say! 

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Posted by Overmod on Monday, June 20, 2016 9:17 AM

Miningman
How about London & North Eastern Class B17 of which 2 were streamlined In 1937.. One was "Norwich City" and one was "Tottenham Hotspur".. The famous "football" trains and clubs.

They changed the names when they streamlined them for the East Anglian.

This was an interesting train, similar to French practice in achieving relatively high average speed with a hard maximum speed limit (80mph) and considerable congestion.  So it was not quite as obviously a 'publicity-only' thing to streamline the B17/5s as it was to shroud those Milwaukee engines...

But these were 4-6-0s, and three-cylinder engines with divided drive to boot, and not 2-6-0s...

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, June 19, 2016 9:43 PM

How about London & North Eastern Class B17 of which 2 were streamlined In 1937.. One was "Norwich City" and one was "Tottonham Hotspur".. The famous " football" trains and clubs. 

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Posted by Overmod on Sunday, June 19, 2016 9:18 PM

rcdrye
I did find an 0-8-0 fireless engine that was streamlined in 1939, but that doesn't meet your parameters.  Were the engines you had in mind shop switchers that were streamlined to match road engines by one of the railroads that did their own?

No, these are definitely road engines, and not particularly slow ones either -- they were used on passenger trains that were among the most modern of their time.

 

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Posted by Miningman on Sunday, June 19, 2016 8:23 PM

Have not been able to log in since last night so it's been very frustrating and I've wasted a great deal of precious time! Sheesh.

Anyway.. I want to say that when I (we) go to that great roundhouse in the sky those Milwaukee Road streamlined 4-6-0's better be there!

Maybe they were hand fired so that we all can get our turn keeping up on a run or two. 

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Posted by rcdrye on Sunday, June 19, 2016 7:07 PM

I did find an 0-8-0 fireless engine that was streamlined in 1939, but that doesn't meet your parameters.  Were the engines you had in mind shop switchers that were streamlined to match road engines by one of the railroads that did their own?

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Posted by Overmod on Sunday, June 19, 2016 5:54 PM

Here is the Rutland just for reference

And with the T&NO Sunbeam and Hustlers

it might stand to reason there would be a fast-freight service, perhaps connecting with the BSM, since after 1934 I believe the 'merged' T&NO was the largest railroad in Texas...

 

but darned if I can find the service that would have had 'styled' power, let alone a picture of it.

 

In any case, the locomotives I was asking about (yes, more than one) were just as thoroughly "streamlined" as the Milwaukee's in the previous question.  And it turns out I was wrong, they were just as thoroughly hand-fired, although perhaps backward a good part of the time ... I was confusing their operating arrangements with other streamlined engines of an even more unusual wheel arrangement (for streamlined power) in not one but two very separate places.

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Posted by rcdrye on Sunday, June 19, 2016 11:53 AM

I couldn't come up with a streamlined 2-6-0 picture.  I believe T&NO (SP) did put skirts on one or more a la Rutland's Whippet 2-8-0.  If that's so they were oil burners.

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Posted by Overmod on Sunday, June 19, 2016 6:00 AM

I am tempted to ask: There were contemporary streamlined 2-6-0s -- why were they not hand-fired?

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Posted by rcdrye on Saturday, June 18, 2016 8:44 PM

Milwaukee 10 and 11 were hand-fired 4-6-0's built in 1910 and streamlined in 1936 by West Milwaukee shops.  Usual assignment was the North Woods Hiawatha until replaced by boiler RSC2s.

You're up, Overmod!

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Posted by Overmod on Saturday, June 18, 2016 7:12 PM

Milwaukee?

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Posted by rcdrye on Saturday, June 18, 2016 7:57 AM

This railroad's collection of streamlined steam included a pair of hand-fired 4-6-0s.

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Posted by Miningman on Wednesday, June 15, 2016 10:46 PM

It's your question Redeye! 

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Posted by SD70M-2Dude on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 11:06 PM

MiningMan if you haven't already, visit the Winnipeg Railway Museum when you get a chance, among their excellent collection they have several pieces of equipment from the mines of northern Manitoba.  Winnipeg Union Station (where the Museum is located) and the Human Rights Museum next door are both beautiful buildings that are well worth seeing even without considering the collections and exhibits inside. 

Greetings from Alberta

-an Articulate Malcontent

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Posted by Overmod on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 10:00 PM

Who knew paleoproterozoic zones could be so cool!

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Posted by Miningman on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 7:59 PM

Quite right Redeye! I'm not sure where the Sweeper came from, there was no information provided. 

The small "loci" and the personal carrier ( can you imagine big burly miners squeezed in there) was used underground, several at each mine level. They were battery powered. 

The bus I had to take a picture of. This was Bobby Clarkes old team and the Bombers were famous and stil are. 

I've posted a U Tube video titled "Flin Flon Geology Field School". Its kind of nifty, only 1:40 seconds long. Used a drone...can't believe how well it turned out. The split limestone blocks at the end are just off the Highway and have snow and ice in them all year round.That will cool you right off on a hot & humid summers day. 

Sorry for the mistakes made in posting the pics...found it rather difficult from my iPad. 

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Posted by rcdrye on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 6:31 PM

The electric locomotive was GE Serial #11061 built as a 70 ton steeple-cab for Canadian Johns-Manville Co. for its Asbestos & Danville Ry (Quebec) where it carried number 42.  Sold through a dealer to Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting Co. in 1952.  HBMS rebuilt it from steeple-cab to end-cab, and used it at least into the late 1980s.  HBMS's road number was also 42.  On the A&D it carried an ordinary pantograph as well as side current collectors and an extension cord reel.  It was equipped with industrial motors (GE HM833) rather than railroad-style motors.  Info from "Interurban Electric Locomotives From General Electric" by Joseph A. Strapac (Shade Tree Books, Bellflower CA 2004).  HBMS had other GE locomotives, including end-cabs, but they had later-design plate-style trucks rather than the interurban-style trucks on 42.  42's original trucks were of a slightly different design than those the engine is sitting on now.

The car with the brooms is a Sweeper, of a type used by most street railways in parts of the U.S. and Canada where snow falls.  The brooms are powered by a motor in the carbody and rotate against the direction of travel to sweep snow off the tracks like a snow blower.  Most likely from a Canadian system (Winnipeg?) unless Flin Flon had a streetcar system.

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Posted by Overmod on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 5:40 PM

For what it's worth, I'm looking forward to your succeeding in getting the pictures up.

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