I would opine not, as far as locomotives are concerned. The general design of the road switcher was pretty well set before portable radios became commonplace.
Wide cab and length notwithstanding, there is little difference between a GP7 and an SD70 from that aspect.
If anything, radios would have been more useful in the days of lower horsepower, where it wasn’t uncommon to see five or six locomotives doing what two will do today. Crews often had to resort to multiple man relays to communicate from the point of action to the locomotive.
Radio has enabled EOTs, and longer trains, as a crew member can now communicate with the locomotive from well over a mile away under most circumstances.
The next evolution was the short hood, created for visibility. As for why N&W and SOU stuck with the high short hood for so long has been explained in a variety of ways, none of which have been conclusively proven. They include protecting the engine crew, enhancing bidirectional capability as the short hood was in reverse so sight lines were less impacted than when running long hood forward in the traditional setup, and convincing the crew that LHF operation was equivilent to SHF operation. Meanwhile, units got larger, stronger, and more reliable.
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In N&W’s case didn’t they order all new road units (which were exclusively road switchers as far as the railroad’s own purchases although they inherited cab units from merger partners) right up until the early 1970’s?
That would seem to support the bi-directional running argument. I’ve read that they didn’t want crews/hostlers to be “prejudiced” as far as cab direction…
I know that there were low-nosed locomotives set up with dual control stands. Pennsylvania Reading Seashore lines had some GP38Acs so configured and O.C N&W continued specifying that setup even after they stopped ordering high short hood units…
all the info you posted on the RS-1/RSD-1 is correct except they essentially stretched the S-2 not the S-1. The S-1 was normally aspirated and rated at 660 horsepower. The S–2 is turbocharged and rated at 1000 horsepower. A number of military RSD-1’s were provided to Russia and they liked the locomotive so much they copied it and built it for over 30 years. The Russians even increased the engine from 6 to 8 cylinders inline rated at 1200 horsepower and hundreds are still in service today. The RS-1 RSD-1 is rated at 1000 horsepower. The RSD-1 has a smaller cab due to tighter clearences on European railroads where American locomotive’s have better clearencces hence the locomotive’s and freight cars are much larger then you usually find in Europe.
while EMC did produce the NW-3 before the RS-1 it was the RS-1 the railroads started to buy in quantity, it was in production for 19 years. The NW-3 and the postwar EMD NW-5 never sold anything like the ALCO RS-1 did. Basically the NW-3 was ahead of its time.
For an end-cab switcher design, that looks right (see Marre p. 410). Marre also credits Westinghouse with building “the first large road diesel in North America” with CN 9000, a twin-unit boxcab that hauled a passenger train from Montreal to Vancouver. Westinghouse also developed its ‘visibility cab’ into a few large, center-cab switchers in the early '30s, including a dual-engine 1,600 HP “massive beast” of which, Marre says, “A case could be made that this locomotive was the first road-switcher” (Northampton and Bath 1601, p. 412).
There were a bunch of center-cab switcher designs appearing about that time, both for industry and railroads, which, when you think about it, make the most sense for an engine you want to run equally well in both directions.
I wonder why the end-cab switcher predominated in the '40s and '50s, and center-cabs got relegated to ‘transfer’ duties–maybe because the end-cabs could use a single large engine on a short frame, whereas transfer locomotives could be longer and if necessary house two engines. But for road use a center-cab loco still makes sense to me. Look at the electric GG1!
So it wasn’t the center-cab that evolved into the road switcher (despite its ubiquity and the Westinghouse “beast”), but an end-cab design with road trucks and a steam boiler (for passenger service), the EMD NW3, which sold only a handful and kept the end cab, and the Alco RS-1, which initially got grabbed by the Army, but successfully introduced the short hood.
The NW3 was not produced from 1942 to 1945 because the War Production Board had EMD building road units while Alco (and Baldwin) built switchers and road switchers.
So the RS1 had the market to itself, just as the EMD FT did in road units.
You could argue that Alco had an advantage in road switchers as a result of experience with the RS1 and had the 244 engine been more reliable as first built, road switchers might have replaced cab units years earlier.
The RS1 had a 539 engine inside it through its entire production life. Also note that Alco (RS2) and Baldwin (DRS6-4-15) came out with full-size roadswitchers in 1946, three years before the introduction of the GP7.
I tried to explain this on the previous page about two thirds of the way down.
I’ll try again…
The NW5 was just the NW3 with the cab moved around, and used the hood, engine and cooling system of the NW2 which was a standard production unit.
The TR1 was a NW3 stretched to take a 16-567 in place of the 12-567. The power increase was only 350 HP so it was possible to retain the end radiator arrangement and a longer version of the existing switcher hood.
World War II comes and goes and EMC becomes EMD, an operating division of General Motors.
Presumably the insistence upon using proven components and existing designs became more serious.
The difference in power between the 12 and 16 had become 500HP and the F unit now had roof mounted radiators cooled by AC fans driven from the companion alternator. So you probably couldn’t use the switcher hood and end radiator design with the higher power engine, but you didn’t have an existing design that would fit in a hood unit.
So someone decided to produce an F unit, using all the standard parts, in a body that provided the visibility required of a road switcher, and the result was the BL1 and later the BL2. Apart from looking odd, this gave very poor access to the diesel engine and was not a success.
Having proved that this was not the way to go, money was made available for a “clean sheet” design which became the GP7 and was a deserved success. It used some features from the FT (the radiator layout) updated with AC drive fans to reduce maintenance and a new simpler electrical control arrangement that reduced the number of contactors in the cabinet, and t
Excellent report, Peter. I wonder about your last statement, given the evident success of Alco’s RS models, and post-war road switchers from Baldwin, Fairbanks-Morse, and even Lima-Hamilton. You’d think EMD would have just skipped the intermediate ‘BL’ step. So it’s interesting that you say EMD’s somewhat tardy entry was because of development cost. Some accounts that I’ve read make it seem as though the GP7 was a complete novelty invented by EMD’s Dick Dilworth, e.g. here:
Obviously Dilworth had plenty of precedents to model his ‘ugly duckling’ on, even if he was faced with the problem of fitting it into the existing EMD production lines. And maybe that’s the explanation. It’s hard to turn a large, successful manufacturing operation in a new direction.
Can you point me to other references that offer the informed level of historical detail in your post above?
EMD’s answer to fitting the GP7 onto an existing production line was found in Cleveland, Ohio. The then new EMD Cleveland production facility opened in late 1948 and was used to build switchers and GP7s exclusively. In that way LaGrange could concentrate on the Es and Fs. The EMD Cleveland Plant was closed in early 1954.
Ed in Kentucky
[quote user=“MrLynn”]
M636C
. . . Having proved that this was not the way to go, money was made available for a “clean sheet” design which became the GP7 and was a deserved success. It used some features from the FT (the radiator layout) updated with AC drive fans to reduce maintenance and a new simpler electrical control arrangement that reduced the number of contactors in the cabinet, and the cost.
But the cost of a new design would not have been agreed to if they hadn’t tried the “lower cost” option and proved that it didn’t work…
Peter
Excellent report, Peter. I wonder about your last statement, given the evident success of Alco’s RS models, and post-war road switchers from Baldwin, Fairbanks-Morse, and even Lima-Hamilton. You’d think EMD would have just skipped the intermediate ‘BL’ step. So it’s interesting that you say EMD’s somewhat tardy entry was because of development cost. Some accounts that I’ve read make it seem as though the GP7 was a complete novelty invented by EMD’s Dick Dilworth, e.g. here:
“The ingenious engineering which went into the BL, combined with high construction costs of the customized carbody due to the great deal of custom fabrication, made the locomotive particularly expensive to produce, and only marginally competitive commercially. Much of the experience derived from the production of the BL was apparently used to great advantage in the design of the GP7 and helped to make the GP locomotives successful.” wrote Win Cuisinier in September 1974. Cuisinier’s article “Inside the BL2” is found on page 20 of Extra 2200 South issue #47.
At that time, La Grange could sell any locomotive it built and more and they weren’t keen on introducing a substantially different model to the production line.
Preston Cook’s article in X2200 South on the BL series is interestingly worded, since what was learned was how not to build a type of locomotive. Even as complex a body as the BL2 could have been production engineered to be built economically in larger numbers, but I think the difficulty of maintenance compared to a normal hood unit was what convinced them to build the GP.
I was fortunate to get copies of correspondence between the EMD sales group and the Australian licencee Clyde Engineering in 1951, when General Electric won an order from the Queensland Railways for a set of ten hood units of about 1200 HP. These GE units were basically scaled down six motor “U boats” some seven years before even the export “Universal” series got under way. Only three more were ever built, and the Queensland Railways laboratories spoke harshly about being given untested prototypes that left them wth the development costs.
But in 1951, Clyde only saw that they’d lost a customer because they had nothing to offer in that category.
About half the letter was devoted to saying that you couldn’t make money if you tailored any design to a customer’s wishes and basically Electro-Motive knew what was best for everybody, which was a standard locomotive.
The rest of the letter outlined what became the expor
In my previous post, I mentally wrongly combined two separate items of correspondence between EMD and Clyde, one referring to the Queensland GEs and one outlining the “Model G” locomotive.
I attach below the “Model G” letter, which outlines the design considerations for an export road switcher. One imagines the correspondence on the GP7 might have been similar.
We are giving very considerable study to a design of a standard narrow gauge diesel electric locomotive. Our studies are directed primarily to the following:-
A. A roadswitcher type of dimensions such that the construction can be standardised for a wide va
Thanks for the clarification, Peter. I looked up the G models in Marre’s Diesel Locomotives: the First 50 Years, and saw that they came in 1954 on, rather later than 1951, so I was puzzled. EMD did go with the AIA trucks, and as Mr McClean suggested, Marre reports that “The standard gauge units later had their idler axles removed.”