First: Does anyone know how Baldwin got 1,600 HP out of an in-line 8 Cyl. engine (608SC) eg…Sharknoses, while at the same time EMD could only get 1,500 HP out of a 16 cyl engine (567), eg…F7/GP7? That really seems strange to me, ie…more HP with half the cylinders. Second: why didn’t EMD “copy” whatever Baldwin did to also have a 1,500 HP 8 cyl. prime mover? It would seem that would halve it’s engine costs.
For openers, the De La Vergne engine had cylinder dimensions of 12.75" x 15.75" and operated at 625 RPM. The 567 had 8.5" x 10" cylinders and operated at 950-1000 RPM. Volumes have been written about maintenance and upkeep of De La Vergne engines, which were primarily a marine design adapted for locomotive use.
First of all the 1500 567 engine only ran at 800 rpm. The 16- 645-E3 developed 3000 hp (turbochrged) for the same size engine frame and the 710 engine is the sane kenght but about an inch and a half taller because of the one inch longer stroke. Both the 645 and 710 operate at 900 rpm and I wonder if the 710 wheres out faster than the 645 because of the higher piston speed. Most manufactures use an arbitrary limit of 2000 feet per second. The GE GEVO locomotive engines are faster than this while the marine engine version is rated at 900 rpm. Probably because marine engine usually run at a higher load factor than locomotive.
It should be noted that the more recent 710 engines run at 950 rpm to produce 4300HP from the sixteen cylinder, (and a few in the Santa Fe SD75s ran at 1000 rpm to get 4500 HP as a test).
But the EMD engines have always been light for their power. The GE FDL-16 was about two tons heavier and the GEVO was about the same but became significantly heavier in the Tier 4 version which was longer, partly to provide larger bearings for the crankshaft. The eight cylinder Baldwin was probably heavier than both.
V-16 versions of the Baldwin engine capable of 4000HP were built under licence in Belgium and I think at least one was used in a locomotive.
Peter
There was talk about the extra weight of the Baldwin engines being “free ballast”, but he problem is that finely machined metal such as engine parts typically cost a lot more for a given weight than unmachined metal.
Ok, thanks. So why do you think that EMD would not have used those same cylinder dimensions of 12.75" x 15.75" and operated at 625 RPM, so they could have reduced their engine size by half (16 cylinders down to eight)? Surely that would have saved EMD alot of money.
No.
The EMD engine was designed for both minimum weight and lowest production cost: see
http://utahrails.net/pdf/EMD_567_History_and_Development_1951.pdf
This might also clarify things:
http://utahrails.net/loconotes/diesel-traction-development-in-usa.pdf
The Baldwin engine cost more to build and was heavier than the EMD, but probably had lower fuel and oil consumption. Kettering’s paper indicates how the detail design of the 201A and 567 was improved to both improve reliability and reduce production cost.
Peter
Thank you for the great PDF files; very interesting reading. Even after reading about the 537 development though, I still can’t get my head around why a company would build a 16 cylinder engine when a 8 cylinder engine would produce 100 more BHP and would have, (intuitively at least to me) cost less to build (eg…smaller block, less cylinders, etc…) Oh well, some things must remain a mystery to me. 
You’re missing the whole point. All cylinders are not created equal. Although the Baldwin has fewer cylinders, they are much larger, with larger pistons. Overall size of the engine is about the same.
No mystery at all. You can maintain an EMD engine with simple tools. Changing a power assembly can be done by a couple of guys and the only special tool you’d need is something to torque down the crab studs. Everything else you need is in your garage toolbox.
The “number of parts” argument has merit, but fails when you think about the FM engine. Really simple. No heads! RRs hated them because you had to pull the top crank to replace a liner.
You will need a chain hoist to pull the 440 pound PA out of the engine. By the way I timed a National Marine team change a power assembly on the " Sheila Moran" in30 minutes from dumping the water until hitting the start button. An engineer on a McAlister tug said he and a deck hand changed out a PA while the cook was ashore buying food and was ready when the the dispatcher called with the next job. The National Marine guys had all the tools including hydraulic wrenches that speed things up by the tugs engineer had to have at least the fixture that attaches to the cylinder head to allow the hoist to connect up and some pretty large torque wrenches you won’t find in your toolbox in the garage.
Not if you take the head off the liner first. I’ve heard of this being done and a couple of guys wrangling the parts by hand. I wouldn’t do it, but…
Well, let’s go the other way, then; you’d need a chain hoist to position the replacement 440# PA correctly over the crankcase and let it down ‘easy’ without the dangling connecting rod scoring the bore of the liner.
If these were actually installed ‘in two pieces’ … how were the liners-with-pistons worked into position, and how quick was it to torque the head to spec?
BTW, for you ‘tugboat engine’ snobs, the revision of the 608 to the 608A was more or less specifically to make it a good locomotive powerplant – which it was, for its era and the assumptions Baldwin (and Lima) made about what made for a good railroad diesel engine. The problem was that it was already effectively horsepower-limited by its combination of speed and relatively high boost; there would be vastly self-limiting returns to scale for any particular rotational speed increase, let alone increased MEP per stroke added to inertial loading.
The development of remarkably high power out of the Cooper-Bessemer design is an interesting thing - Will Davis and I believe Don Strack have researched the period in the '50s where it began to appear as if the rotating assemblies in the engine design could produce (and tolerate) vastly more horsepower than previously expected. There is no comparable upside for one of the Baldwin engines (which didn’t use as robust a pin and journal arrangement, with ‘master’ rod, as the CB design did) although there was certainly quite a life for the Baldwin engine design in Europe after BLH threw in the towel post-Westinghouse quit.
The development of remarkably high power out of the Cooper-Bessemer design is an interesting thing - Will Davis and I believe Don Strack have researched the period in the '50s where it began to appear as if the rotating assemblies in the engine design could produce (and tolerate) vastly more horsepower than previously expected.
This was most obvious in 1952. One of the first examples of a GE road locomotive was sold to Queensland Railways in late 1951, a locomotive that even looked a lot like the mid 1950s export U-boats, with a 12 FVBL rated at 1100 hp input to the generator. A year earlier, the New South Wales railways had purchased RSC-3s from Montreal which provided 1600 HP from an engine of the same nominal displacement.
GE had a line of shovel nose units that sold well in Argentina, but only the first batch had the Cooper-Bessemer, the others using the higher rated Alco 244.
So at this time, GE presumably realised that if they were to separate from Alco, the C-B had to at least match the 244, and later the 251.
The cast crankcase of the C-B, and the FDL was well designed and could take the higher forces of the greatly increased BMEP required to get 2500 HP, and later 4400 HP out of a 16 cylinder. But fatigue cracks appeared and as the power went up, the life of the crankcase reduced.
In 2004, when BHP purchased a number of forty year old secondhand SD40s to meet rapidly increasing demand for iron ore, Rio Tinto had replaced the crankcases on all of their first batch of C44-9Ws which were just ten years old.
Argentina remained a big market for GE who purchased many of the early export units, eight cylinder U12s and U13s and twelve cylinder U18s. By 2003 (so more than 40 years) while some of the old GEs were still running, crankcase cracking was taking its toll and striped GE crankcases could be seen stacked behind many locomotive workshops. But the oldest C-B engines had been replaced by locally built Alco 6-251 D engines of the same power
That answered my 1st question, but my 2nd question was why didn’t EMD use the larger cylinders to get an 8 cylinder engine vs 16 cylinders. ??
That may be true, but companies bought the Baldwin 8 cylinder engines despite the simplicity of the EMDs.
Because they weren’t starting with a clean sheet of paper. EMD started as a relatively small company, EMC, that built self-propelled rail cars. They purchased/licenced an existing engine design that they modified for locomotive application. Their expertise at the time was not engine design, but locomotive building - more of a system integration job than component manufacturer.
As time went on, they got more and more involved in engine design. But, the current 710 engine is nothing more than the evolution of the Winton design they started out with. Designing an engine from a clean sheet of paper is quite a task. Not something EMC/EMD could afford to do. Better to take a proven “off the shelf” design.
Not many… EMD pretty much owned the market by 1960.
May be more accurate to say that EMC/EMD got into the locomotive business as a progression in making larger, more elaborate and more powerful rail cars, e.g. the Pioneer Zephyr and UP City of Salina. The first E’s built for the Santa Fe and B&O were a bit like a rail car with the engines taking up the interior space.
The 201/201A engines were a product of the GM era, with Kettering directing the devlopment of the unitized injectors used on the various Winton/EMD diesels as well as the Detroit Diesel line. The smaller cylinder size, higher engine speed and use of two cycle design was done to make an engine with much pounds per HP than existing diesels, with one very large non-RR customer in the form of the USN.
“System integrator” is a very apt description of pre-GM EMC.