I’ve been MIA from these forums for several years now. Part of the reason was I was acting as the executor of my late sister’s estate which ate up most of my free time. If you ever get a chance to do this, decline. It is a royal pain you know where. That process has now been completed and now I can get back to model railroading again.
I am still figuring out how to navigate the new website. It’s not as intuitive as I had hoped but I will hold off passing judgement until I’ve had a chance to work my way through it. I don’t even know if I have retained the same screenname that I had with the old website when Kalmbach was running the show. If it doesn’t post with this message, my old screenname I think was NYBW-John. Not 100% certain about that. NYBW is the abbreviation for my fictional New York, Binghamton, and Western Railroad which I have conceived as a composite of several railroads that operated through upstate New York, mainly the DLW and the NYOW. The main trunk runs from northern New Jersey through Binghamton and on to Buffalo with major branches into northern New York.
I do have one question. Recently, I was browsing through some ebay offerings and came across a term I was unfamiliar with, that being Bo-Bo. I had to look it up and discovered it refers to a four axle diesel with two bogies, aka powered trucks. I’ve been involved in model railroading since the late 1970s and this is the first time I ever came across that term. Is it something that has recently become in vogue or has it been around for a while and I just never happened to see it before.
Well, it’s good to get back involved with model railroading. I have largely neglected the hobby for the past three years and my layout needs some serious TLC before it becomes operational again. I had just started a major revision when things went off the rails and I hope to get back into it now that I have some time for it.
Bo-Bo is a European convention: it means the same thing as B-B does in the context of diesel-electric locomotives.
In their system, B refers to driven axles, and by default a driving wheelbase in steam locomotives is connected by rods or gears. To denote individual axle drive of the powered axles, Bo is used instead (in this context, for a two-axle set with individual drive motors powering the axles).
The most recently famous example of this was the character Boco, in the TV Thomas and Friends, which had a British prototype with a two-motor Bo truck at one end and a three-motor Co truck at the other. Like the large passenger FMs this was done for weight distribution and limited axle load…
A, B, C and D all refer to how many powered axles there are in each truck (or bogie). Numbers refer to unpowered axles. A “C-C” engine, like a GM SD-9, has two three axles trucks, all three axles powered. However many GM passenger diesels, like E-7s, had A-1-A trucks. The outside axles were powered, the middle axle was an unpowered “idler” axle, just there to provide a smoother ride.
Some railroads also ordered early diesels with A-1-A trucks instead of B-B trucks to spread out the engine’s weight over lightly built branchline trackage.
p.s. when I read your post’s title, my first thought was “only 15? there’s a lot more “characters” on the forum than that!”.
It was there to provide extra weight-bearing capacity. To an extent the longer wheelbase and center axle gave a little additional stability over the two-axle Blomberg, but the hard limit on ~36" wheels imposed by the castings limited the final-drive ratio in the EMD truck.
That was less a factor in the Alco drop-equalizer type, dimensioned for 752 motors carried inside the truck wheelbase. To get three motors in that truck that way, you’d need to adopt the ‘Trimount’ design (with unequal spacing of the axles).
I will second the comment about being executor. In my case, I was the second choice, and it took over 2 years for the primary to bail out, leaving me the job of piecing things together. It’s been a year and a half, still not done. And it was supposed to be simple job!
I’m newly back in after 25 years. Welcome back, a lot of things have changed.