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Could this be Raymond Loewy's streamlining for US patents 2338212 and 2338214

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Could this be Raymond Loewy's streamlining for US patents 2338212 and 2338214
Posted by dinodanthetrainman on Thursday, June 26, 2014 1:51 PM

I found this on the Tyco forums. Could this be Raymond Loewy's streamlining for US patents 2338212 and 2338214

Could this be Raymond Loewy's streamlining for this.

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Posted by Firelock76 on Thursday, June 26, 2014 5:27 PM

I don't know, but I sure see the genesis of the Pennsy T1 in that patent drawing!

Otherwise, it looks a lot like a drawing of a postulated, but never built steam turbo-electric locomotive I've seen in a 50's era railbook.

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Posted by Overmod on Thursday, June 26, 2014 6:45 PM

A couple of the 'original' Loewy Triplex body designs are design patents 136260 and 136261.  The latter appears very similar in a number of respects to the "Tyco" picture:

Loewy also did at least one design study for the version of the Steins locomotive (2590473) that became the V1, but I have lost the reference -- this was in the late '40s and featured quite a bit of fluted siding accents and heavy trim moldings.  I know I've posted this in some threads in the past -- perhaps someone can find it directly.

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Posted by dinodanthetrainman on Friday, June 27, 2014 9:51 AM

Triplex? were they actually considering a ooo OO OO OOO ?

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Posted by Firelock76 on Friday, June 27, 2014 5:24 PM

Well, it HAD been tried before.  In 1914 the Erie purchased an triplex locomotive from Baldwin, a 2-8-8-8-2 to be exact, then in 1916 bought two more.  Making a long story short they were diasppointments.  The boiler couldn't make enough steam for the locomotive to go any faster than 10 miles an hour. 

After 14 year of pusher service on Gulf Summit Hill in Pennsylvania they were scrapped.  Adding insult to injury, they were too big to be serviced in Erie's own shops.  The Lehigh Valley shop got the job.

I don't believe there was any serious thought about building any more triplexes after these three.

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Posted by Overmod on Friday, June 27, 2014 6:32 PM

Firelock76
Well, it HAD been tried before. 

It's not 'that' Triplex.

Loewy's Triplex was so called because it separated the locomotive into three modules -- I believe in his original scheme, water was in the leading module, then the locomotive 'engine' and boiler, then the coal tender trailing.  A bit like the old 'three-box' automobile packaging.  In his earliest versions, at least the ones I saw, the engine was more-or-less conventional, similar to what is shown in the '214 patent but with cylinders leading and firebox trailing as in a conventional locomotive, and didn't have engines articulated under the hinge points as in the '212.

PRR and Steins turned their version around, as evidenced in '214, so that the coal bunker was leading and the boiler was reversed (one reason, as noted elsewhere regarding Garratts, was to get the stack exhaust behind the crew position).  This -- for good or ill -- would go on to be a feature of the V1 STE, the hush-hush competition from Baldwin that became the M1, and ultimately the N&W designs culminating in the TE-1.

Correspondence at the Hagley, in the PRR files, has Loewy and PRR at odds about rights to the 'Triplex' idea; I'm sure there's more on that subject in their new Loewy collection...

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