Ah me, the death of steam, the death of the PRR, the death of the NYC.
"The head understands, but the heart never will."
Maybe railroad empires are like other empires, or "...players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage, then are seen no more."
Wasn't Bill Shakespeare a genius?
I don't know if this is Crestline - if I'm not mistaken the picture is taken right in front of an 'extended' stall of the kind built for the S1, but as of 1942 Crestline didn't have such a stall in that location:
http://www.crestlineprr.com/trackchart.jpg
Could it have been Fort Wayne?
MiningmanTry this conversation or How the Pennsy went bust. Pres. of the PRR-- " Ahhh, one of those Q2's, won the war for us, and they are still nearly new! What a great locomotive! The future looks bright for us!" Head of Motive Power-- "Well sir we are scrapping them" Pres.--" Whaaat? Explain yourself" Head of Motive Power-- "Well, they cost much more to operate than our J1 2-10-4s, and there is very little operational performance difference, or maintenance saved through use of the duplex principle, at the speed we run freight. We didn't specify the antislip gear correctly, either, and it turns out many of our men have trouble operating our duplex locomotives with front-end throttles correctly without that device working. Their water rate is through the roof -- not as bad as the turbines, but we can only carry enough even in our largest tenders for about 150 miles over the road." We're also looking at Diesels sir, Diesels... they're better. Cost a bit more but well worth it. Our major locomotive builders say it's the way of the future. We can get most of the advantage of our 1943 plan to electrify the railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh without the expense. And we don't have to put in turntables or long wyes to turn them. And it looks like the cost of maintenance and supply of steam locomotives is going through the roof, much more than catering to our online coal producers can save." Pres.-- "How much more are these Diesels?" Head of Motive Power--"Well about three times the first cost, for equivalent horsepower; but they do things a Q2 won't like start any train they can pull, so we only need four of them to replace one 8000hp Q2 or V1. And this guy Dilworth points out we can use the individual units into smaller sets to suit train size, so since we no longer have wartime loads to justify 7500 horsepower per train this looks particularly useful to us going forward." Pres.-- " Hmmm... twelve times the cost to replace each nearly new Q2... that hurts, but look what we save in infrastructure, maintenance and idle-time cost over the years, if the builders are telling us the truth about Diesel reliability and in-service availability ... and maybe we can get some of our money back on the duplexes by making them out to be dogs ... good job! Well done!"
Pres. of the PRR-- " Ahhh, one of those Q2's, won the war for us, and they are still nearly new! What a great locomotive! The future looks bright for us!"
Head of Motive Power-- "Well sir we are scrapping them"
Pres.--" Whaaat? Explain yourself"
Head of Motive Power-- "Well, they cost much more to operate than our J1 2-10-4s, and there is very little operational performance difference, or maintenance saved through use of the duplex principle, at the speed we run freight. We didn't specify the antislip gear correctly, either, and it turns out many of our men have trouble operating our duplex locomotives with front-end throttles correctly without that device working. Their water rate is through the roof -- not as bad as the turbines, but we can only carry enough even in our largest tenders for about 150 miles over the road."
We're also looking at Diesels sir, Diesels... they're better. Cost a bit more but well worth it. Our major locomotive builders say it's the way of the future. We can get most of the advantage of our 1943 plan to electrify the railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh without the expense. And we don't have to put in turntables or long wyes to turn them. And it looks like the cost of maintenance and supply of steam locomotives is going through the roof, much more than catering to our online coal producers can save."
Pres.-- "How much more are these Diesels?"
Head of Motive Power--"Well about three times the first cost, for equivalent horsepower; but they do things a Q2 won't like start any train they can pull, so we only need four of them to replace one 8000hp Q2 or V1. And this guy Dilworth points out we can use the individual units into smaller sets to suit train size, so since we no longer have wartime loads to justify 7500 horsepower per train this looks particularly useful to us going forward."
Pres.-- " Hmmm... twelve times the cost to replace each nearly new Q2... that hurts, but look what we save in infrastructure, maintenance and idle-time cost over the years, if the builders are telling us the truth about Diesel reliability and in-service availability ... and maybe we can get some of our money back on the duplexes by making them out to be dogs ... good job! Well done!"
It might also be mentioned that fixing the Q2 slip control to the extent of providing active traction control through a split independent brake neatly gets around many of the issues with putting the power to the ground, certainlly better than the bang-bang design of butterfly valve in superheated steam that got built. There was no problem with the frankly fascinating computer that did the slip assessment and correction, only with the (crude) mechanism tinkering with the steam flow -- problem was that it was designed only as an emergency device, like penalty-brake systems in '20s ATC, so no continuous operation or sophistication in steam modulation was involved ... for all the trouble and expense, and at least in 20/20 hindsight the utter necessity, of providing autonomic slip control on high-power duplexes run near the limits of their capacity.
I won't go into the disaster that was their boilers as built, except to note that while welded boilers would have fixed the problems even more expediently than it did on 'certain other roads', neither PRR nor Baldwin had invested (as Alco did) in the necessary technology to make them right, and that's a big and complex boiler to have to fabricate. If they had shared follow-on use of the boiler with other projects -- notably with N&W and Lehigh Valley, and on the second-generation mechanical turbines -- there might have been something in it. But if you're going to higher and higher technology to get locomotives to run on the cheapest coal without training your people how to benefit from all the wizardry ... expect to be leveraged out very fast when the cost of your 'cheapness' goes west in the postwar economy while you are constrained to run the thing to its full appetite in a world that no longer monetarily values what it does for all that expense.
I should have been more specific with respect to GM in aviation that I meant actual airplanes -- as with GM building automobiles and not just components for 'assembled cars' elsewhere, or making locomotives at EMC and not just powerplants via Winton/Cleveland for 'serious' locomotive builders of the day. And it's not as if GM didn't try building aircraft -- just that I, and you, and probably anyone else, would really rather forget what happened when they did...
Note that GM did not get into the aviation business, even as a bit player, which would surely be a tactic if they intended to promulgate a "NCL" model to destroy part of an industry.
GM were a big supplier to the aviation industry.
Allison supplied most of the engines for USAAF fighter aircraft (P-39, P-40) until the Rolls Royce Merlin was built under licence by Packard.
Post war, Allison turboprops powered the hundreds of C-130s and P-3 Orions (and a few commercial Electras).
They still supply the engines for the Marines' V-22, although Rolls Royce own Allison and Detroit Diesel now. This ownership is the result of GM going the same way as the PRR.
Peter
Well thank you for the reply Overmod. It is an historical account and quite accurate with the facts as selected.
My fictional conversation between the President of the PRR and the Head of Motive Power staring at the Q2 live, as it is in the photograph, captures the 'essence' of what I think was going on.
I hardly think that the Pennsy or the Central with their history and important real estate holdings, their credibility and power in society, their ability to tap into the very being of the USA, not to mention an army of blue chip lawyers, and probably some pretty darn good Saul Goodman shady types made them helpless dupes.
Maybe they had to play hardball, even dirty hardball, and not turn their back on what they were, recognize what they have, appreciate and draw strength from the roundhouse and their 100 years acquired expertise and stuck with what they do best and fight on.
As an armchair quarterback ..what did they have to lose?
By the time those scrapyard brothers got around to torching the T1's in maybe '56-'57 those expensive first generation Diesels Pennsy was in such a rush to get were right behind them. Double down loss.
The steam was perfectly fine and could have lasted to 1970, but of course that's not what happened and they betrayed and scorned themselves.
Just a dreamer and a romantic trying to see it another way.
Overmod Frimbo basically had the word on how the government paid PRR, and most other railroads, back after WWII: they couldn't even be bothered to lift the 10% 'war tax' long after there was no war to gouge the railroads over. I have not forgotten the clever little scam with the 'land grant' mileage, either.
Frimbo basically had the word on how the government paid PRR, and most other railroads, back after WWII: they couldn't even be bothered to lift the 10% 'war tax' long after there was no war to gouge the railroads over. I have not forgotten the clever little scam with the 'land grant' mileage, either.
That deal sounds about as square as the one Roscoe Arbuckle got.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
MiningmanBUT the whole duplex drive thing was very much Pennsy's direction and future.
No.
For a while they thought it was, but the bloom came off that rose very quickly.
First they get cozened out of north of $3 million in Depression-era gold-backed dollars by Baldwin, getting a grand-looking engine that never quite did what it should. Then they work really hard making the answer to a whole bunch of questions that weren't asked right, in the Q1... look how far that design's details wound up in later practice. Then the Q2s, grand for running 150-car trains at high speed on a railroad ... largely devoted to mineral traffic (only 13.5% 'merchandise' in 1946, said Trains at the time, in the 100th PRR Anniversary issue) and possessed of a hard 50mph speed limit. Then 50 T1s, and we all know the shuckin' and jivin' that went on with them as early as 1948.
The wave of the future was in the noncondensing turbines, first the S2 and then the various flavors of V1. And even those went to the curb (in the case of the V1 without even having a prototype built, although the 1944 version would likely have been something of an operational failure) when F7s did everything better and ran across 5 divisions without trouble, too.
PRR along with many other railroads 'lost the peace' in many, many ways; I think they expected along with most others that the newer, better streamliner revolution would surely bring the clientele back as it did in the late Thirties. But it wasn't going to be steam doing any of the really fast work; look how quickly Milwaukee shucked the As and Fs once it had even relatively conservative diesels ... and how quickly those things went to the dogs, much like GG1s did, when no longer actively maintained...
GM was no overt enemy of PRR or any other railroad; they were not just 'opportunists' but followed the Sloan game plan to enter and win the motive-power wars. And no company did it better, or more successfully, than they did. Note that GM did not get into the aviation business, even as a bit player, which would surely be a tactic if they intended to promulgate a "NCL" model to destroy part of an industry. Just because they'd sell more trucks than locomotives doesn't mean they were actively lobbying against railroads ... just for more free roads. Consumers did the rest... admittedly, hornswoggled by Insolent Chariots social engineering and marketing, but not as a conspiracy to ruin railroads.
My take on PRR coming apart is more rooted in hidebound Philadelphia arrogance, and refusal to understand how things were changing. They got all the way through formalizing the legalities of the merger without determining their dispatch and computer systems were not only howlingly primitive but utterly incompatible. Then threw out Perlman and all his wise practices in favor of ... well, it's a little hard to figure out what the priority was going to be.
Everything I read when I was young essentially said NYC didn't have much of a pot to piss in after Young shot himself, and just got worse and worse to the point PRR was supposed to stop the shoestringing. Come to find PRR had not much of a pot either, and some decidedly poor ways to aim the streams.
They still had soul in the Sixties; it just wasn't enough to carry them in the grand manner to which they had become expected. Had they fought for deregulation then... oh wait, they wouldn't. They'd have to appeal to the wrong sort of politicians anyway, who wouldn't give the arrogant Pennsylvania anything but a bigger tax bill to please actually voting constituencies.
I almost can't imagine how bad it would have been if they'd engaged in the amount of indebtedness involved in the Sam Rea line, shortcuts in New Jersey, and faster line bypassing Pittsburgh for the passenger trains -- only to find that even nine-hour trains to Chicago wouldn't sell. Heck, they shucked the Atglen and Susquehanna and there were far more reasons to retain that than a high-maintenance bridge line largely in tunnels through low-inhabited nonindustrial parts of Pennsylvania.
Miningman, I sent you a PM.
York1 John
A likely scenario!
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Could be Penny, could be. Thinking this is at Crestline, but not 100% sure.
Try this conversation or How the Pennsy went bust.
Head of Motive Power-- " Well sir we are scrapping them"
Head of Motive Power-- " Diesels sir, Diesels... they're better. Cost a bit more but well worth it"
Pres.-- " How much more ?"
Head of Motive Power--"Well about three times the cost, each, and .. ummm, we need four of them to replace one Q2"
Pres.-- " Hmmm... twelve times the cost to replace each nearly new Q2..... good job! Well done! "
It also looks like a pic that was taken by a roundhouse foreman to settle an argument.
"SEE!?! I TOLD you it would fit in the roundhouse!"
If only the Duplexes had been developed 20 years earlier, then they would have found a great home on fast transcontinental mail & express trains or priority freights, in an era when they would have been the fastest thing on wheels.
PRR management let that whole 'Standard Railroad of the World' thing go to their heads. They got complacent and thought they were too big to fail, well before that phrase came into the popular lexicon. When the world changed they had no idea what to do, and fell into denial instead of really trying to survive, modernize and thrive.
What Perlman did at New York Central was harsh, but he kept that railroad on its feet. NYC probably could have survived on its own had the disastrous Penn Central merger not happened, but I guess we'll never really know.
Yeah, no doubt about that at all. Overmod has termed it the "win the war now locomotive" which is likely true BUT the whole duplex drive thing was very much Pennsys direction and future. Yes, as Jones states " designed and built by Pennsy themselves". Also why is the need for a high speed freight or express locomotive no longer required? I suppose Nickel Plate and NYC didn't get the message, not to mention Union Pacific and Sante Fe, mind you different cookie there, but speed was # 1 with them.
I've said my piece about Pennsy several times. Something was very rotten, a successful attempt at undermining spurred on by outside forces and a compliant wink wink management, gotta jump on the bandwagon. Perfectly good, successful and new locomotives scrapped and all that expertise and money just burned and destroyed.
Pennsy could have flexed their political muscle far more than they did and stuck to their guns, do what they do, expose stuff, wage court battles, round up allies, go against the grain, pressure this and that, fight the corruption and the weasels. Get the employees and grandma on side with it all. Wage economic warfare to the highest levels. Send a big $bill, demanding payment, withholding against taxes, to the State and Feds over commuter services. Appeal to patriotism, their effort was crucial to winning the war.
Instead they blew their war profits on poorly designed Diesels and got into debt on the easy peasey payment plan with the company that wanted them as weak as possible, a true enemy. They just played along and slowly bled to death. (No it wasn't China), it was GM.
The Standard Railroad of the World did not even try to live up to its name. They became a little squeaky mouse. What little soul they had left disppeared permanently when they tore down Pennsylvania Station. Unimaginable. They lost the war by that point anyway.
That machine was formidable-looking, no doubt about it! No-nonsense, all "Accomplish the mission at all costs!" PRR.
Miningman I luv this picture of the Pennsy Q2. Its one of those pictures that you could swear you were there to see this. It's remarkablely and notably disturbing just how short their working lives were. Such an outstanding and impressive piece of machinery, a pinnacle of steam engineering, something new and exciting, the future, only to be scrapped unceremoniously in a few brief years of service. Not because they were flawed, or failures, poor design, a joke piece of junk, but because they weren't wanted any more. You see, they, the Pennsylvania Railroad 'changed their minds'. Seems they changed their minds about a lot things until all that sheer feckless behaviour caught up to them and they were annihilated off the planet. Their bones and remains scattered and shattered, from the Standard Railroad of the World to ridicule and then faint remembrance.
I luv this picture of the Pennsy Q2. Its one of those pictures that you could swear you were there to see this.
It's remarkablely and notably disturbing just how short their working lives were. Such an outstanding and impressive piece of machinery, a pinnacle of steam engineering, something new and exciting, the future, only to be scrapped unceremoniously in a few brief years of service.
Not because they were flawed, or failures, poor design, a joke piece of junk, but because they weren't wanted any more. You see, they, the Pennsylvania Railroad 'changed their minds'.
Seems they changed their minds about a lot things until all that sheer feckless behaviour caught up to them and they were annihilated off the planet. Their bones and remains scattered and shattered, from the Standard Railroad of the World to ridicule and then faint remembrance.
Retouched a little bit. Q2 is my favorite freight steam engine. They were powerful, good looking, semi streamlined, designed and constructed by Pennsy. I won't complain if they and the fleet of T1 were allowed to serve until 1960s... Steam engines in America were so heavy that they couldn't find a 2nd home outside the States. Imagine if India's railway system could handle these heavy steam engines, and Pennsy willing to sell them at a very good price, they would have had an even more colorful new life in their new home...
Jones 3D Modeling Club https://www.youtube.com/Jones3DModelingClub
CSSHEGEWISCH Flintlock76 Or even HMS Hood vs. KM Graf Spee. It would probably turn out like the Battle of the Falkland Islands in WW1.
Flintlock76 Or even HMS Hood vs. KM Graf Spee.
Or even HMS Hood vs. KM Graf Spee.
It would probably turn out like the Battle of the Falkland Islands in WW1.
More than likely, unless Graf Spee could get in a lucky hit, otherwise it would have been no contest.
18" guns on the proposed HMS Conqueror? I don't know, both the RN and the US Navy experimented with 18" guns prior to WW2 and didn't find any substantial improvement in performance over 16" guns so they didn't pursue the matter any further, but what the hell, "WOW" is all fantasy anyway.
M636C I want to see the proposed British RN N3 vs. KM Bismarck I'd be happy with King George V replacing Hood with all else the same. The illustration above seems to imply a ship with three twin turrets, not triple turrets... Peter
I want to see the proposed British RN N3 vs. KM Bismarck
I'd be happy with King George V replacing Hood with all else the same.
The illustration above seems to imply a ship with three twin turrets, not triple turrets...
Thanks for pointing this out! Yes, the Conqueror in the game has 4X3 18" guns instead of 3X3. Another similar ship Thunderer has 4X2 18" guns.
rcdrye Miningman 1) Now this is the poster boy for what a traffic jam is. I can't even count all the Streetcars. No wonder they invented traffic lights. Chicago on a good day not long after the cables were converted to electricity. Note the "Big Pullman" on the left turning onto what is either Dearborn or State. The dark Chicago Rys scheme on the Pullman and the primitive Elston Ave. car put this in late Chicago Rys, or early Chicago Union Traction days. Chicago Surface Lines contributed a great deal to the developent of traffic lights in the 1920s, precisely to untangle scenes like this.
Miningman 1) Now this is the poster boy for what a traffic jam is. I can't even count all the Streetcars. No wonder they invented traffic lights.
Chicago on a good day not long after the cables were converted to electricity. Note the "Big Pullman" on the left turning onto what is either Dearborn or State. The dark Chicago Rys scheme on the Pullman and the primitive Elston Ave. car put this in late Chicago Rys, or early Chicago Union Traction days.
Chicago Surface Lines contributed a great deal to the developent of traffic lights in the 1920s, precisely to untangle scenes like this.
Flintlock76 Railfans speculating on "How fast?" is certainly fun. Regrettable? I don't think so, just harmless giggles. It's kind of like naval history buffs speculating on match-ups that never happened like HMS Victory vs. USS Constitution, USS Iowa vs. KM Bismarck, or USS New Jersey vs. IJN Yamato. Or even HMS Hood vs. KM Graf Spee. Have to leave that stuff to "World of Warships," which I don't play or have any interest in.
Railfans speculating on "How fast?" is certainly fun. Regrettable? I don't think so, just harmless giggles.
It's kind of like naval history buffs speculating on match-ups that never happened like HMS Victory vs. USS Constitution, USS Iowa vs. KM Bismarck, or USS New Jersey vs. IJN Yamato. Or even HMS Hood vs. KM Graf Spee.
Have to leave that stuff to "World of Warships," which I don't play or have any interest in.
I want to see the proposed British RN N3 vs. KM Bismarck, too bad that "World of Warships" is just a "free" computer game for entertainment, not a simulator that could render how ships would get damaged in real-life battle through computer graphics. There is no N3 or G3 in the game at the moment but the game has the canceled Lion-class with 4X3 18" guns as a tier 10 ships, named Conqueror...
Miningman1) Now this is the poster boy for what a traffic jam is. I can't even count all the Streetcars. No wonder they invented traffic lights.
Overmod ...It is sometimes fun, if a bit regrettable, to watch railfans speculate on 'how fast' things could go -- perhaps the most outre being a docent at a certain railroad museum claiming the top speed of a GG1 was 156mph, but not far behind being the Stan Repp claims (in his early Super Chief book) that regular speeds of 150mph were regularly broken by the early ATSF locomotives. (He even provides the method by which engine crews supposedly avoided having the speed recorder 'tape' the overspeed, in case you were predisposed to scoff...)
...It is sometimes fun, if a bit regrettable, to watch railfans speculate on 'how fast' things could go -- perhaps the most outre being a docent at a certain railroad museum claiming the top speed of a GG1 was 156mph, but not far behind being the Stan Repp claims (in his early Super Chief book) that regular speeds of 150mph were regularly broken by the early ATSF locomotives. (He even provides the method by which engine crews supposedly avoided having the speed recorder 'tape' the overspeed, in case you were predisposed to scoff...)
Regular speeds of 150mph (241.4kph) were regularly broken... The engine crews regularly played a trick that would have cost their career and life regularly... Too "good" to be true! If the figure was 105mph instead of 150mph, it would sound more convincing...
Jones1945Meanwhile, in Japan, the _____ were building something like this:
Perhaps the Poms can be forgiven; Singapore was still less than a quarter century ago for them then.
Old Man Thunder certainly figured out how to finance the supertrains, which was really the most important detail here.
Well thank you Midland Mike! Nice to know my memory isn't all that shot after all. Makes me feel good!
Miningman 4) I think this is in Troy NY from what I remember but I could be wrong. Sorry for the small image. 4) Another small image. Anyone know where this is, it seems quite distinctive.
Yes that is Troy, NY from the North along the single track D&H. I think the second small photo might also be Troy from the south along the double track NYC. In both photos if you look in the distance, you can just see the tower that was located over the track at the south throat of the Union Station trackage.
Jones1945Is this also the reason why diesel engine manufacturers and RRs seldom emphasize the top speed of the postwar diesel-powered trains? I read EMD E7 could hit 110mph+, 106mph for FM Erie-Built. Not sure about EMD E8 and E9, probably rated at 79mph...
Any diesel-electric will go as fast as its motors are geared for, and it has the horsepower to overcome the resistance of. As I recall the New Haven DL-109s were geared for "120mph" but they didn't have much real chance of operating that fast with a train. You could get E units with different ratios, each with a corresponding 'speed' (you will find these in the literature; a common E-unit speed worked out to 92mph) and of course there was the typical tradeoff with taller gears reducing effective tractive effort but allowing the motors to spin slower (and induce less back EMF) for a given speed.
Not all locomotives were given the final stages of field weakening in transition, either. You may recall the brief (and it was very brief) experiment with field-weakening coils applied to the Electroliner, resulting in 108mph on what I recall to be 28" wheels. In the story I heard, someone was ordered under the cars to torch off the coils then and there, no shop delays or temptations to be tolerated...
Meanwhile, what was permissible with the gearing was not always particularly achieved. The N&W TE-1 was a case in point: Baldwin apparently led the N&W to believe that the thing would run 65mph with a full trainload, which of course it never would. Louis Newton had some choice comments on this.
It is sometimes fun, if a bit regrettable, to watch railfans speculate on 'how fast' things could go -- perhaps the most outre being a docent at a certain railroad museum claiming the top speed of a GG1 was 156mph, but not far behind being the Stan Repp claims (in his early Super Chief book) that regular speeds of 150mph were regularly broken by the early ATSF locomotives. (He even provides the method by which engine crews supposedly avoided having the speed recorder 'tape' the overspeed, in case you were predisposed to scoff...)
1) Now this is the poster boy for what a traffic jam is. I can't even count all the Streetcars. No wonder they invented traffic lights.
2) Big honkin express/passenger train. One Hudson, no problem, stretches back as far as you can see. Diesels would require multiples of expensive locomotives for this consist. No doubt someone will tell me that's better but you can't fool an old horse fly.
3) Buffalo Central Terminal .. honoured in a stamp at the time.. very nice!
4) I think this is in Troy NY from what I remember but I could be wrong.
Sorry for the small image.
4) Another small image. Anyone know where this is, it seems quite distinctive.
5) Cab Forwards lined up waiting the call to action. Taylor Roundhouse.
6) One last look at the NYC Elevated line. What a mess, unused, forlorn and neglected.
Miningman ...Seems to me that after '63 it was all a downhill unstoppable spiral as far as pride in passenger service went, again predominantly in the East but out West as well on a number of roads. It was, as you say, not overnight exactly but a day to day erosion.
...Seems to me that after '63 it was all a downhill unstoppable spiral as far as pride in passenger service went, again predominantly in the East but out West as well on a number of roads.
It was, as you say, not overnight exactly but a day to day erosion.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the _____ were building something like this:
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