Hi all!
I’ve been working on some things recently, and one of them is a Dash-8 rebuild idea for the C40-8W, C40-8, B40-8W, and B40-8 units that haven’t been scrapped but sit in a storage yard
But if any of you guys have rebuild ideas, shoot them at me
The rebuild(s) I’ve done are electronic modernization, AC traction - Even a slug variant!
CSX 45 is an AC40C6M-8RS (RS meaning Road Slug)
CSX 44 is an AC40C6M-8
Notable differences between the two are the lack of radiator fans, exhaust, and other equipment.
if it’s a slug, it’s no longer an AC40.
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Fair point, but what is it going to be designated?
I guess that you can name it whatever you want, since it’ll only exist in your fantasy world.
I’ll let you name it Backshop. I can’t think of anything at the moment.
Samantha??
I would have been expecting something more ideal to fit the locomotive
Well whenever a locomotive is given a name (eg. ES44AC) it has to mean something and the AC40C6M-8 is the mother unit but I don’t know what to call the slug and I have no idea why Samantha would be a good name unless its going to be a nickname
It’s a slug. What more do you really need to know? The designations of slugs is usually just a bunch of letters someone made up already .
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Fair point, Samantha, it is!
Please excuse my ignorance, what is a slug? Is that like a “B” unit?
Al
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A slug is a “locomotive” without a prime mover – it has to be connected to another locomotive wired to feed it power.
DC traction motors have significant low-speed power restrictions, so if you want to get best effect from, say, a diesel-electric powerplant, you provide extra motors that can be switched in. Old or obsolescent diesel-electric locomotives can be ‘adaptively reused’ by removing the combustion engine and other parts, ballasting for adhesive weight, and supplying cabling and other control gear so the traction motors receive proportional power from a ‘slug mother’. The New York Central famously reused some of their very early experiments in internal-combustion locomotives as yard slugs.
There can also be uses for additional traction motors at higher speeds, so there is such a thing as a ‘road slug’ – this is often semipermanently coupled to its ‘mother’ and helps, for example, locomotives like GP40s that have less-sophisticated traction control systems be more tractable in service that requires switching or repeated high-rate acceleration. (It is also nice for crews to have a cab that is not next to a diesel engine running at high power output…)
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@Woke_Hoagland That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
Al
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Made an IACR variant (Transparent for a small project I’m working on)
