Of course, there is nothing quite so overwhelming as an N&W high nose SD45 or an EL SDP45 leading long hood forward. I’ve seen both.
Most eastern roads (NYC, PRR, RDG, NH, LNE, RUT, BM, MEC) ordered their first generation Alcos and FMs set up for long hood leading. CNJ was an exception as they ordered their’s with dual controls. They will always look best with long hood leading. Second generation was a different story. Most roads ordered them set up for short hood leading and they look best that way.
ISTR that one of the copper carriers (Phelps Dodge?) had the only GP-9’s built with low short hoods ran their locomotives long hood forward. The low short hood was to allow the crew to keep an eye on the cars.
Southern Pacific had a small fleet of factory built low nose GP9’s. The Cartier Railway up in Quebec also had several GMD examples.
YEP, GM did NOT amke the train masters FM did. Thanks for spotting my typo.
Caldreamer
Thanks, Cal.
Oh that’s OK, I’m sure we know what he’s talking about.
I’ve mentioned this before, but concerning long-hood vs. short-hood ops with FM Trainmasters the Jersey Central crews always preferred to run them short-hood forward. Typically if a Trainmaster was run long-hood forward exhaust fumes would drift into the cabs nauseating the crews. Most photos I’ve seen of CNJ Trainmasters do show them in the short-hood forward mode.
By the way, when I run the Lionel CNJ Trainmaster on the layout I’ve got it running short-hood forward out of concern for the “crew.” [;)]
Interestingly, I’ve never heard of any other FM OP engined unit having that problem. Maybe they did but it’s never been mentioned?
They all did. You’re talking about locomotives with first-generation governors and unsophisticated pressure-charging, using mechanical injection in a two-stroke valveless design. Then there are all the oil issues. An OP in a locomotive is going to stink a lot of the time.
Mind you, this was a problem with EMD engines, too, just less discussed, and not as much exhaust mass flow per prime mover ‘ahead’ of the crew. To my knowledge no one on an FM was actually asphyxiated by the exhaust, as one crew on an EMD consist was…
What is an OP?
It stands for opposed piston, a type of diesel engine layout popularized by Fairbanks-Morse for US Navy submarines in the late 1930’s (With the Fairbanks-Morse 38 8-1/8 diesel engine still a fixture in all but our Virginia class nuclear attack submarines as emergency generators, along with some of our surface fleet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposed-piston_engine
This family of engines from Fairbanks-Morse went on to make a brief splash in the North American railroading scene from the end of WWII through the early 1960’s when the last locomotive order was finished in Wisconsin for Mexico.
Past rail and naval installations, they were a very popular choice in the latter days of the 1st generation of Canadian Seaway construction when Canada was enjoying a flurry of shipbuilding with the opening of the new St. Lawrence Seaway. As steam turbines fell out of favor in the mid 60’s, Fairbanks-Morse OP’s were often selected through about 1974 or so for Canadian ships.
And while I don’t know much about Soviet locomotives, supposedly reverse engineered clones were commonplace.
Here, opposed-piston engine. This has no cylinder head or valves; think of it as two conjugated inline engine blocks mounted together with their piston crowns facing each other, dished just enough to form a roughly lenticular combustion chamber at the point of nearest approach. The blocks have scavenge ports reasonably near BDC, with one for air and the other for exhaust; when the opposed pistons are nearly at the bottom of their strokes (they are not phased 180 degrees opposite, but within about 15 degrees of being so) the charge air displaces the products of combustion, and fills the cylinder with clean air just as the pistons start back up and cut off the ports. No valves, no valve train, all timing handled by very robust and strong spiral-bevel gearing between the two crankshafts. (In most locomotive practice the generator is driven only from the lower crank, with the scavenge blower or supercharger driven from the upper one – a vertical shaft conjugates the two for the remainder of power transfer.
It may have occurred to you by now that it would be nifty to do this with fork-and-blade V engines rather than mere inlines. And lo and behold! welcome to the Napier Deltic, developed for torpedo boats, put in perhaps the greatest and most iconic of British locomotives, and at the heart of one of Tree’s most favorite pieces of apparatus…
Exhaust getting into the cab when running long hood forward is still a problem today.
The farther the stack is from the cab, the worse this problem is, and FMs had their stacks at the far end of the engine from the cab. GE’s are the same, and the FDL engine’s exhaust just drifts lazily up out of the stack and sinks down onto the cab when running backward. GEVO exhaust isn’t nearly as thick, but it is still attracted to the cab in the same manner.
Turbocharged EMDs have the stack at the near end of the engine, and the 2-stroke exhaust races up out of the stack with much more force, so it will miss the cab altogether.
Non-turbocharged EMDs are somewhere in between, though ours tend to be quite smoky as most suffer from age and poor maintenance these days, not to mention all the idling they see in yard service.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic
They were among the greatest British diesels because they actually ran reliably (must not have used any Lucas products either). Still, leave it to the British to come up with a overly complex design like that.
The FM OP engeings could really produce a lot of torque depending how they were geared. My friend Bob Bailey and I were in the Santa Clara tower and watched as an H12-44 pulled 150 cars out of the SP’s Santa clara yard. and push them back down into the bowl. It smoked like an Alco and roaded. Was going maybe 5 mph, but it did the job. I counted the cars and could not beleive my eyes that the little switcher could move that many cars.
Caldreamer
Thanks, Leo. And OM.
Sounds like a good argument for elephant ears!
Even upside-down those don’t seem to have worked too well! [:-,]
The Huntsville-Madison County Railroad in North Alabama is a shortline still actively using a high short Hood GE B23-7. It was originally Southern Railway 3986 and still retains that road number.
The HMCR also has an active U23B that was originally L&N 2800, but it is a low nose. It has also been SBD 2800, CSX 3301, CSX 9554, VLIX 9554, TISH 9554, and now HMCR 9554.
Both the B23-7 and U23B are currently located at the HMCR’s satellite railcar storage facility at the former GM/Delphi campus near Decatur, Alabama and located adjacent to the North-South CSX mainline just north of the junction with Norfolk Southern’s East-West mainline where it crosses the Tennessee River on a bridge shared with CSX. The main HMCR operation uses former NC&St.L (later L&N) tracks running North-South to the south of the NS mainline where it runs through Huntsville, AL.