What’re those?
The stretcher should be obvious, it is used to carry an injured person to safety.
The alertor, called a Reset Safety Control in Canada, is a device designed to make sure the Engineer is alert and not incapacitated. It is designed to be difficult or impossible to bypass unlike early “Deadman’s Pedals”. The early ones required the Engineer to press a switch or lever every few minutes and could not be continously pressed or they would activate the brakes. How often they needed to be activated depended on the trains speed. If the trains speed was high then they had to be operated about every minute. Newer systems just require the Engineer to operate one of the locomotive controls in the same time periods. He gets a warning tone or buzz when he is required to activate the alertor. Movement of any control continously resets the devices timer so if the Engineer is blowing for Crossings and changing the throttle he might never hear an alertor tone since the system knows he is slert.
The early repowerings with Caterpillar engines were less than successful in part because they were oddballs. It would be interesting to find out the experience of the mechanical departments of PTRA, New Orleans Public Belt, and UP in Houston (the leasers from CIT Financial) in maintaining fleets of CAT-powered locomotives.
As far as I know they are working out OK. The MK5000Cs didn’t work out though, and they weren’t repower jobs. There are also significant Cat powered locomotives in Europe too. It seems that the 3500 series engines have had better luck in locomotive service than the bigger 3600 series Cat engines.
John
Do you know how the GP20 cats are doing on the Twin Cities and Western ?
Ah, yes…much more interesting back then, much more of a challenge to get over the road.
Pulling a huge train up Whitehouse hill out of Milwaukee enroute to Fond du Lac, going so slowly with the locomotives working at full power, the trainmen walking in front of the train with water bottles full of sand, sanding the rail because the sanders on the old power were either plugged or just not working…ah, yes…those were the days.
BC Rail repowered some of its MLWs (RS18s?) with Cat diesels.Anyone know how they worked out? Did CN keep them after they took over?
Well, GE was looking for a 6000 HP engine and they gave Caterpillar’s design a look.(it would have been a V-16, 6000 HP @1100-1200 RPM) GE will not say how these tests went, but since they used a German designed Deutz powerplant for the AC6000,so I think they thought the Deutz plant was the way to go. Twelve years- [B)]- and lots of headaches later, they might feel differently about this, but they defend the design, and still are working on a tier-2 compliant 6000HP power plant, which still follows the basic Deutz design. (or, is it spelled Deuts? Any one have 411 on this puppy?)
Is 6000HP some magical figure and if so, why? Is that just a continuation of the “Bigger is Better” school of thought? It sounds like CNW wasn’t the only company to experiment with or use Cat engines.
CNW, BN, ATSF and UP all experimented with Caterpillar engines in SD40’s or SD45’s, with varying degrees of success, the rating was usually 3000 HP.
6000 HP on six axles has long been a goal at GE, however that figure seems to be too big for practical use.
I was gonna say…it seems like more road diesels are in the 3k-4k range. Did the CAT engine work well with others when connected via bus cable?
Ja, Deutz. Germans love the “tz” combination, and my family name ends in “tz” as well.
Dale, TC&W and RRV&W are pleased with the Cats. They are a good match. They get fuel-miserly fairly newpower out of the deal. Soo didn’t like the overhauls at 4 year intervals. In the service TC&W uses them they won’t need overhauls anywhere near that often.