As far as I know, it was only on the Xploder, and only for the brief period the train ran between Cleveland and Cincinnati – still promised in the timetable of 4/56, and gone without trace by that of 10/57.
(t may be notable that the pictures of the new train in the tmetable do not show the shark nose – they look much more like the Dan’l Webster nose.)
For some reason it is very rare to find pictures of this train in color.
“Xploder”? We really need Spell Czech, don’t we?[(-D]
No, Mod-man’s got his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. The “Xplorer” bombed!
Which is too bad, it was a cool-lookin’ train! Unfortunately “cool” wasn’t selling at that point, at least as far as trains were concerned.
Moi? Rien d’accord!
That was the nickname the NYC crews gave the Maybach-engined RP-210 after they had a few months experience with it. It’s a bit like the Burlington people calling the streamlined Aeolus Hudsons “Big Alice, the Goon” (Or the ATSF boys calling their streamlined Hudson Mae West… [:-^]) It’s the same sense of pun on ‘explorer’ that led to Microsoft’s browser being called Internet Exploiter…
You can find the story in most of the accounts of the Xplorer train (e.g. Doughty’s ‘New York Central and the Trains of the Future’ which is a fun read if this stuff interests you).
Had a Ford Explorer late 90’s , always called it the Exploder, then one day it did.
There is a proper way to do a put-down after an amateur’s attempt at a joke.
I had heard that my brother’s father-in-law had a brief career as an entertainer in his younger days. One day I call over to my brother’s place to tell my clever joke, only he was out for the evening and his father-in-law was minding the grandkids.
“I was going to tell my brother this joke, but maybe you would like to hear it. I head that Ford was coming out with a new vehicle that was based on the Contour chassis but was an SUV like the Expedition. They wanted to call it the “Ford Collision”, but this never made it past the first focus group panel.”
After the longest pause, the response was “Paul. You should know that I serve on the board of my condo association. Every Wednesday evening, I hear a joke like this.”
Making the trains run on time would be a good start.
That NYC locomotive looks like a Dachshund that just smelled something unpleasant.
Loewy’s Sharknose styling worked really well for ‘original’ carbody height. It did not do so well when cut down to be ‘adapted’ for the lower-profile equipment… it appears this was a relatively late design “enhancement”. (See the little ‘cuts’ of the artist’s conception in the April 1956 NYC system timetable, printed at a time before the final schedule for the Cleveland-Cincinnati service had been finalized, for the prior, Dan’l-Webster-like nose…)
The big black X on the front did not improve matters, either graphically or semantically…
Paul M.-- Did not intend it as a joke. I always called it the ‘exploder’ , just my cynical side I guess and after 750,000 faithful miles the engine lunched. Bearings going, tranny was difficult, extreme rust, lots of other things. It ran much better in the winter than the summer.
On what did it lunch? Crew people? Did it LURCH while LUNCHING? Or just BURP.
You gave me a good laugh with that typo.
Not a typo! I meant lunched! Big Daddy Roth talk.
NYC’s “Explorer” or as you said “Exploder” had a pair of Baldwin RP-20 hydraulic diesel locomotives. Equipped with 3 power sources, the regular diesel transmission/generator to power the passenger cars, plus two small energized electric motors for use in and out of Grand Central Terminal. It’s identical twin, “Dan’l Webster” caught fire while attempting to use the third rail while entering the Terminal during a publicity run on Jan 8, 1957.
So, what you’re saying is:
IT BLOWED UP REAL GOOOD!!!
Now I did make a typo… 750,000 Km’s!!!.. not miles.
Major metal meltdown … late at night, very dark, on the 403 West of Hamilton.
The railroads will stay Imperial until the end of time
Oh no no no no no no.
“Xploder” only had one RP-210 (note spec.) - you can clearly see the arrangement at the trailing car (there was no attempt at an ‘observation’ as on things like the Jet Rocket). This was probably a reason for poor riding in that last car, as with other lightweight trains.
The Xplorer RP-210 did not have the auxiliary electric motor to the Mekhydro (Baldwin called it a Mec-hydro and attempted to co-brand it … until it started lunching!) transmission. If it had one, it would have had to be compliant with power at Cleveland Union Terminal … which had been de-electrified for several years by the time the train was introduced … at 3000V with overhead supply. Arrangements were actually made for what would have been dramatically different pantograph height on other lightweight equipment, so this could have been done (and far more effectively than the shoe arrangement on the Dan’l Webster turned out to work!) but that was neither wanted nor to my knowledge implemented (I have not seen the transmission, nor do I know if it had provision to install the components for the auxiliary propulsion) as things turned out.
The Maybach generator engines (again co-branded, until there started to be ‘issues’ with the German diesel technology) were different on the two trains, perhaps due to consist length or amenities: one version of RP-210 had an inline 6, the other a V-8.
Many of the 'issues
The two concepts are not at all semantically similar. Do not be deceived by the fact of the obvious pun about “Xploding” into thinking this.
“Lunched” means it ate itself up … think main bearing problems, valve-gear drive failures, massive issues related to insufficient oiling. This is likely what happened with the “Baldwin-Maybach” propulsion engines in question: they just couldn’t be kept running on the road with any great effectiveness.
“Blowed up”, on the other hand, implies something like the (supposedly frequent) crankcase explosions you get with attempting to use 35xx series Caterpillar engines with typical slackadaisical railroad attention to maintenance requirements. Spectacular death, destruction, and FLAME as the engine gives up the ghost. Power assemblies and components embedded in lineside house roofs and bedrooms. It would almost be encouraging to know that some of these engines had Viking funerals, but I’m much more inclined … perhaps ‘knowing too much’ about supposed Baldwin detail-design quirks that may well have carried over into the “BLH” era … to think it was with not a bang but a whimper that these powertrains went out…
It’s funny how Canada has been offically on the metric system for a long time, but not one single person I have ever met here has expressed their height or weight in grams, centimeters or whatever. It’s feet, inches and pounds.
Well Lady Firestorm and I had a bit of a shock when we went into a Laura Secord candy store in Saint John’s, Newfoundland in 1992. The candy, both boxed and loose, was measured out in grams and kilos. Oh brother, metric measurement!
“Uh, now what do we do?” she asked me. “I’m not sure,” I said, “I’m trying to remember, how many lids in a gram, how many grams in a key?” [:-^]
We figured it out anyway. The standard box was close to the size of a Russell Stover box. Close enough!
54’s statement goes a long way to explaining why when we’re watching “Property Brothers” Jonathan and Drew use English measurements, i.e. inches and feet, instead of metric. I thought that was just for the benefit of the American audience.