What would be the correct colors for a PRR keystone herald (of about 12" high)?
My brain tells me a tuscan red background with gold letters and outline. But all the examples I see online seem to have a red background and white letters and outline; in fact I own one such that I bought 30-some years ago. Is that urtext?
Any opinions, gentlemen?
This will probably confuse you even more:
Looks like it doesn’t matter. Take your pick and it’ll be hard for someone to say you’re wrong!
To my knowledge the keystone background has always been toluidine red. I think some of the versions that were painted or ‘stickered’ flush on locomotives followed the shift from gold leaf to that weird buff color in the other striping in their edging. 5882 appears to have a gold/buff keystone with white PRR.
I’m not an authority on cast station plates but I’ve seen white edges in the ownership of PRR rivet-counting fanatics (and there is no tribe in fandom, including the B&O, that has brought nit-picking to such a pre-eminent degree!)
That leaves locomotive keystones for steam, and I am going to crawfish and tell you to ask on the PRR groups.io that replaced PRRfax and over on the RyPN interchange.
What I find most bizare - both the Baldwin Centipede and the EMD E-7 are both numbered in the 5800’s.
*EP20 and BH50. [:-^]
[quote user=“zugmann”]
*EP20 and BH50.
Zug, that is not a “BH50” – look at the striping and, if that doesn’t convince you, look at the train. That is a full as-delivered 6000hp 120mph locomotive, incidentally (according to Kiefer, who I would trust) being the shortest 6000hp locomotive on the market as well as the best chassis configuration at the time for high speed…
“Every bit the diesel equivalent of the T1”. Unfortunately in more ways than just top speed and horsepower… [:-^]
[quote user=“Overmod”]
Then what IS it?
You could have jsut said it was a BP60. That would have been simpler.
Reminds me of a review of the Herron Rail video “Pennsylvania Glory” I read years ago. The opening music was an orchestral arrangement of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God!” Mr. Reviewer said “A bit grandiose, but Pennsy fans probably won’t think so.” He was probably right.
But that’s not his style.
“When one word suffices, use 20!”
[quote user=“Overmod”]
My understanding of the BP60 is that it could not maintain speeds account the electrical power being spread among too many traction motors, irrespective of any maintenance issues the locomotives had. They started in passenger service and worked their way down the preferred use heirarchy to work train service as they failed at every task they were assigned.
Didn’t the centipedes fail at hump service because they were too long to go over the crest?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a locomotive ‘high centred’ yet still on the rails…
raises hand (well, I didn’t get to see it. But it was a crew in my yard)
Local crew was spotting cars over an unloading pit. They got the engine stuck on the pit. rails dipped down enough for the engine to bottom out on it. They had to use the other engine to drag it off, if I remember…
You will complain about the answer.
What it IS is a Baldwin DR-12-8-1500/2 SC. (Or DR-12-8-3000 to those who ignore the breakout of double-engined units).
According to the nit-picking PRR community the first production engines were given class BP-1, when delivered in 1946. As dieselization progressed the PRR changed its classification system and the units became BP60a’s (I believe the ‘a’ resulted from use of the 600-series engines).
I believe there was little wrong with their electrical design; it was the execution and construction that was the disaster. If you think of one as two F3s in a common carbody the idiocy of ‘too many traction motors’ will be more evident… and the Baldwin’s had far better traction motors to boot…
PRR compounded the felony, badly, by deciding they would make nifty helper engines. It would be pretty clear to you or me that a locomotive with two tugboat engines and a huge cast underframe, no dynamic brake, and eighty brakeshoes was not exactly a poster child for economy with a substantial mileage running light-engine(s) down substantial gradients. (And then we get to traction-motor blowing… [:-^])
One notes that Seaboard bought theirs to replace (excellent!) 2-6-6-4s … excellent enough to go to B&O and become one of the best classes that road ever ran … and didn’t seem to consider them failures; NdeM ran a couple all the way into the '70s, but they supported the locomotives the way they should have been.
I had not thought about unloading on the vertical curves of the hump being the cause of the derailments but it would make sense, especially if vertical articulation at the joint between the two main underframes couldn’t be eased to where each half-locomotive could cope through equalization…
NdeM liked them for the same reason that led CN and Milwaukee to buy things like the GMD1 and SDL39, all the axles spread the weight around on ‘light-duty’ track.
I don’t have it in front of me right now, but Trains had quite a good article on the centipedes back in the 70s or 80s, I think after the last ones way down south had been retired. The author mentions, among other things, that the Mexican engineers had no fear, and they ran as fast as the centipedes would go.