Locomotive has been moved to North East!
Note that it still has an unusual front truck.
Is that a prototype for GE’s steering truck design?
The rear truck looks like the standard Hi-Ad truck that all our remaining GEs have, from Dash-9s to ET44ACs. The Dash-8s had/have a mix depending on who bought them, and I think one unit actually has different front and rear trucks, but they all seem to be headed for scrap.
Is there a link to the illustrations discussed here?
Peter
Sorry, here’s the link.
Thanks.
It is a little amusing that it was moved by two older EMD units still in regular service.
The lead truck design was indeed used on the eight BHP AC6000CW units. However, these were scrapped to prevent them falling into the hands of a competitor, rather than because nobody wanted to buy them. The adjacent FMG system purchased SD90MAC-H units from the USA just as the AC6000CWs were being scrapped.
Does 6002 still have the HDL engine? It would be good to hear the distinctive sound of the HDL again. The EVO-16 sounded much more like an FDL.
Peter
Wasn’t this the damaged Union Pacific unit that GE replaced under warranty with a brand new AC6000CW?
A quick look at the usual sources for railfan pictures doesn’t show any activity over the past decade for her. So if she’s been avoiding the test track at Erie and such all this time like that suggests, my hunch is that she retains her HDL and that’s probably why she’s been idle.
Someone asked about the engine in the comments, and the uploader replied that the HDL was removed. He also mentioned that GECX 6000 does retain its HDL, at least for the moment, but it is currently in storage at the Erie plant with an uncertain future.
6002 might not have any engine under the hood right now, the unit does not have an exhaust stack in the photo right at the start of the video, let alone the distinctive twin stacks that these originally had, which are visible in the shot of CSX 644 from 4:53 to 5:00 in the video. The aerial shot at 1:44 looks like just two holes in the long hood, not stacks.
An AC6000 as a museum piece. Ouch.
Even so, it was nice to see her delivered by a former SCL GP38-2.
That is NOT the Steerable truck as seein on Canadian Pacific and CSX GE units. Though it looks related. Was it an early proto?
As I recall, GE’s Steerable truck efforts were not as well received as EMD’s in the early 90s.
While I am well into old pharthood - it is sobering to see something ‘so new’ to be donated to a museum.
Motive power has yet to make a quantum leap beyond the AC6000’s or for that matter the AC4400’s.
AC’s began to populate the Class 1’s in the middle 1990’s and are approaching 30 years old. Locomotive technology, in the past, has had generational improvements approximately every decade. With the coming of AC traction technology, it seems that technology has now stagnated with only minor detail improvement having been made in the past 30 years.
Yeah well, “turn of the century” hasn’t meant 1900 for quite a while now.
I think there were two separate designs of GE steerable truck, complete with separate patent applications although the principle of operation was similar.
The earlier design was more common. The later design on 6002 might have only numbered seventeen examples, the eight Australian units and the prototype now in the museum.
GE had the problem that being second in the field, the simpler steering mechanism used by EMD was covered by patents, so GE had to use different linkages.
Steering trucks without linkages are more popular now, both with Progress and Wabtech.
Peter
I would point out that today’s AC transmissions are different from the first generation’s, so much so that it’s more than a minor detail at least from the perspective of the shop. The first gen was GTO which had a propensity to explode and take the neighboring inverters with it. Today’s IGBT inverters are far more reliable and are getting lighter by the day. The rebuilds from Wabtec and Progress (DC-to-AC and AC rebuilds) are getting the IGBT hardware. The latest QSK95 rebuild from KLW has an inverter package from CAF which seems to be very compact. We’re only about two decades into North American AC transmissions so we still have vast room for improvement.
We should be seeing SiC FETs replacing IGBT in locomotives before the end of the decade. FWIW, high end EV’s are using SiC inverters as SiC FETs allow for an even more compact and efficient inverter.
Not to belittle the advances in electronics that have been implemented since the first of the AC traction engines entered service - the succeeding generations of motive power have touted a 1 for 2 or a 2 for 3 replacement ratio for the prior generation of motive power. To date that quantum step has not happened since the dawn of AC traction in the middle 19
Much of what appears to be stagnation is because the focus has been on emission targets over the past 20+ years (and keeping the increasingly complicated results of those designs reliable).
When one looks at what’s going out of the stack, there’s been a revolution in that area for new power compared to an AC4400CW of the late 1990’s. And presumably room for more growth as well, since it seems unlikely that Tier 4 is the upper limits of what’s practical.
Of course that all does little good if your customers aren’t buying. But there’s a lot at play behind the current love affair with rebuilding that isn’t necessarily the fault of what the two big builders are offering for new power.
The railroad operating mentality has also changed, as PSR has led to a return to the ‘hold for tonnage’ and ‘drag freight’ era, despite what the railroads will tell you.
An AC6000CW won’t start any heavier a train than an ES44AC, but it can haul that same train at a higher top speed. And top speed doesn’t really matter in most of the modern freight railroad world.
As for emissions, there is talk of a Tier 5, which would probably force even GE/Wabtec to use exhaust aftertreatment in order to comply.
I had always thought CSX had purchased their CW60AC’s to ‘expedite’ the intermodal network. That they didn’t stay in the service very long seemed to disprove the idea that 1K HP per axle could move intermodal faster at less cost.
I was never privy to any of the cost/benefit measures that Locomotive Management would use to assess the abilities of a particular group of locomotives.
I see that one of the justifications for “Tier 5” is that many diesel engines can meet Tier 4 without a particulate filter. Hmmmm…
OTOH, there’s been work on modifying the fuel injector/combustion volume to make the combustion process to be similar to a Bunsen burner. The groups working on it are claiming substantial reductions in NOx and PM. From what I gather, the idea is that the injector would spray into a tube which would inhibit combustion until there air and fuel are well mixed.
Throttle body for a diesel?