Book Progress

December 2017

The tale of the pre-history of the Dutch 1200, the Spanish 278 and possibly the Chilean E-17, E-20 and E-30 just made a leap forward with the unexpected early arrival of Michael Bezilla’s wonderful book Electric Traction on the Pennsylvania Railroad 1895 – 1968, all the way from California. The whole US side of the story is there, notably why the forefathers of the Dutch 1200 and the Spanish 278, the PRR E-2b, E-2c and E-3b test locomotives, were not altogether a success even if they did more than the jobs the PRR expected from them. As a result I am now able to start planning the section on the US story in English and in Dutch and am going to look for a translator English to Spanish who can take on the Spanish text for Spanish and Chilean readers. The story of the Dutch locomotives is ready for writing as well.
My research now refocusses on the history of the RENFE class 278 “Panchagro’s”, of which serious information is exceedingly hard to find on the Internet. And on finding out whether the Chilean Railways E17, E20 and E-30, built by AnsaldoBreda and Ercole Marelli in Italy, indeed have Baldwin-Westinghouse ancestry as one book implies. There is suggestive material in that direction from technical details (notably their very Baldwin looking quill drives) but is as yet not supported by any written evidence on how the US and the Italian manufacturers came in contact and interacted (like in Spain, Indonesia and the Netherlands there was Baldwin-Westinghouse electric traction in the 1920’s here too, amazingly). Given the time when these Chilean loco’s were built Baldwin-Westinghouse heavy traction was defunct already (1954) but a tranche of Panchagro’s for Spain were still built around 1960 so Westinghouse clearly had after that time no qualms about selling their know-how to whoever was interested.
And, of course, the translation to the Dutch language of An Unexpected End to the Journey progresses slowly but certainly as well. I am dealing with the 1917 explosions at Ciurea in Romania and St. Michel de Maurienne in France right now. Casey Jones is dead already and WWI will soon be over with the 1918 collapses of embankments at Weesp in The Netherlands and Getaa in Sweden. I found a very good and descriptive book on the latter during a visit to Stockholm, incidentally. Also good to get back into dealing with Swedish.

Here a photograph I’d never seen before I came across of the head-on crash at Bellinzona in 1924 (page 168 of the book). What you’re looking at is the boiler of the steam heating vehicle, attached to the double-headed electric locomotives, that set the leading first class wooden German coach of the delayed international express train behind it on fire. Which is where the German politician Karl Helffrich died. The boiler broke lose of its place in that steam heat vehicle and collided with the rear end of the locomotive; a detail I was unaware of.