Afternoon all,
I’ve been following the Baldwin DR-6-4-20 ‘Sharknose’ as Delaware and Hudson 1216 and I was wondering if anyone knows if the unit is still operational or is in a railway museum?
Credit to Railfan & Railroad Magazine for the image
Credit to Railfan & Railroad Magazine for the image
I’m also still wondering about the DR-4-4-1500 ‘Babyface’ units too 
Both of the ex-D&H/Monongahela/NYC Sharks have been dedicated to railroad museums upon his (Larkin’s) death.
The Babyfaces are all long gone, although the CNJ shop forces supposedly kept one of the double-enders around for a while by making some shop-air connections to it and building a wall around it as an “air compressor”. CNJ was running A-B-A sets of Babyface cabs in the Scranton area as late as 1965… but I never actually saw them.
I have never quite been able to muster up enough nostalgia to miss the Gerties, though…
What about the ‘Babyface’ units?
Anything on those or are they all gone?
I was under the impression that the ‘Sharks’ were the last of the Baldwin cab units left in existence, of any type. I didn’t know anything about their present ownership besides that it was private, neat to know.
Unfortunately, Baldwins don’t seem to have stuck around long enough for many to still be hanging around by the time that people started getting seriously interested in preserving diesel locomotives. Though I suppose we might not be nearly as excited about them if they weren’t so rare now.
-El
I believe both of the surviving Sharks are RF-16s. The DR6-4-2000 Sharknoses were the PRR BP-20s, and it is a greater crime that they were all scrapped than that the domestic Alco PAs were.
Baldwin by and large were maintenance nightmares. The engine crankshafts were enormous pieces of jewelry, and were difficult to turn when a bearing ‘spun’ of became scored – which is what sidelined one of the two surviving RF16s. Each unit was built separately, like a steam locomotive, and had its own ‘custom’ manual (in which all the running changes and repairs were supposed to be documented). If the unit failed where this documentation was not easily available…
Meanwhile, many of the fluid lines (which are hardlined and gasketed on EMDs) were done with hose connections, which in theory made them more tolerant of vibration. In practice, they leaked and leaked and leaked, so that various combinations of oil, fuel, and water dribbled down… that was bad enough, but the electrical cabling was helpfully run under the floors, in channels that would hold dribbles for a while, whereupon the cable insulation would get soaked and the ground faults… impossible-to-trace ground faults… would start.
As you probably know, maximum governed rpm on the 606 and 608 engines was 625rpm. Something a bit startling that was a logical consequence was that the engine made enough power at idle to accelerate the locomotive to above 23mph on level track. An unfortunate consequence was that the main generator was wound to run at lower speeds, so a prime-mover swap included a generator swap if you didn’t want an expensive set of reduction gearing – something often ignored by ‘thrifty’ railroads who discovered the issue a bit late.
PRR went so far as to convert an A-B-A set of DR4-4-1500 Sharks into what were essentially Alco RS18s above the deck. The B-unit of that set was subsequently sold to a coal breaker in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area (I believe as mobile power for a crane or dragline of some type) and scrapped in the first great wave of Chinese demand for scrap in the middle Nineties. THAT was a shame.
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While im glad these exist atill, being from the Monongahela valley, I wish they were both in MGA colors instead of their current colors
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“MGA colors” being the later NYC cigar band in white on dip black, albeit with neat “MONONGAHELA” in what looks like a NYC font?
No, what’s needed (and what should have been adapted for D&H) is the locomotives’ actual paint scheme:
(There was, in fact, a story that the actual demo to the D&H people involved a repainted model Shark from a local hobby store that didn’t have a lightning-stripe unit in stock. As soon as one was found, it was prepared for preservation… but D&H had already approved the ATSF approach…)
I’d be perfectly happy to make up a set of ‘Monongahela’ magnetic signs to apply for display, with magnetic logos for the ovals on the noses.
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I saw these sharks on the Michigan Northern in the late 1970s but I wasn’t really a sharknose fan, and I never got photos. Last I heard they were in inside storage at the Escanaba & Lake Superior shops. As I recall Trains did an article on the E&LS preservation efforts within the last ten years.
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For anyone thinking of knocking on the door of the E&LS and wanting permission to see them, don’t bother. The owner had too many incidents of railfans taking “souvenirs” off of them.
I was lucky enough to see them both at Brownsville on the MRY and at Whitehall, NY on the D&H. I recently bought a self-published book that said that the MRY never had them all running at once. They normally just had one A-B-A set in operation. When one unit would have a catastrophic failure, they’d set it aside and bring a stored one into service.
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