That Nose!

One of the defining issues of what concerns an “American looking” locomotive is that nose. Writing the book about the Baldwin designed NS series 1200 electric locomotives I had to acknowledge the fact that, really, only that nose is what made them into the “Dutch Americans”; nothing much else. And in fact, the design of the front of a locomotive internationally does indeed lead to such characterisations as an American versus a European (later the rest of the world, Japanese and Chinese versions do not look materially different) type of locomotive. It has, incidentally, to be said that the next generation of US passenger locomotives, the Siemens Chargers, no longer have any noses to speak of and the one on their predecessors, the General Electric Genesis type, was not really a nose to be proud of either. Looked a bit Belgian, in fact. In France the 1970’s Alstom electronic chopper generation with their monomotor trucks made a valiant, indeed good looking, attempt at keeping up a nose (the Paul Arzens designed “Nez Casse”, the broken nose) but there too the next generations dropped the feature again. In the UK the best known and best looking examples were the 3,300 Hp Deltics on the East Coast Main Line; I saw them, heard them, but never sat behind their windscreen. I did, however, deal with the less powerful English Electric class 37 Co’Co’s and noticed a feature that is common to as good as all of them: You can’t see their coupler/ buffers from your seat when coupling up; you have to hang out from the droplight beside you. In Europe that usually means that there is someone on the deck between the buffers to work the coupler, a dangerous place because you can’t see the person. Shunters and drivers in my bubble solved the issue in that the shunter, standing on the driver’s side of the train, would signal you up to touching the buffers and then indicate that he was going in between. Which meant that the driver rooted the machine to the spot by blowing out the brake pipe, exactly what anyone would do if he or she shunted on his/her own. As regularly happened due to crew shortage in my days at Stewart’s Lane when making up early morning loco-trains for Hither Green freight depot. That was good for physical exercise, incidentally, climbing up and down 12 cabs in one go to check on parking brakes being released and no control-voltage keys left in their slots (had about 12 of those after a year, useful if you had to start up and pump air on a number of locomotives at the same time). Then bring the prepared set up to the departure signal, wind-on the parking brake of the first loco and then go for yet another coffee whilst waiting for the driver to take them out. After a night of sitting around some 37’s had a problem releasing their brakes when the brake pipe was being charged for departure, for which not many drivers were actually able to find the donkey tail to blow out the brake cylinders from the distributors, and a brake continuity test had to be done anyway, so assistance was required. This experience of working hand-coupled stock also rather informed my writing about coupling up American trains in the days before Jonathan Luther (Casey) Jones died on the track at Vaughan Mississippi on the 30th of April 1900. By then quite a lot of US rolling stock had already been fitted with what in the UK is called the buckeye semi-automatic coupler, the Janney type coupler, and lots of fingers and hands of future US railroadmen would no longer be mauled by drivers moving their stock a bit fast toward the section to be coupled up; not slow enough to allow the man on the ground some safety when coupling up the link-and-pin coupler. I just wonder what it was like to try and guide the link into the coupler-box of a rather fast approaching set to be coupled up; stuff of nightmares when you were aware you possibly might have to kiss goodbye to a few fingers or half a hand in the next seconds. Oh yes, and in order to save the coupler boxes and shanks from being crumpled into oblivion in that case, blocks of wood -or later cast steel- were fitted on the buffer beam either side of the coupler. Almost like buffers in Europe. These blocks were meant to keep the distance between the vehicles in case the coupler shanks collapsed and they were called dead-blocks for a good reason: if you were in their way when attempting to guide the link into the coupler box, they’d take out your breast cage. And if the coupling failed anyway, they wouldn’t keep the cars apart far enough to ensure that you weren’t part of the effort to cushion the impact.

1) To compare the original US design of nose against what was made of it in Europe, I raided my N-Gauge model railway stock. I had a Fairbanks-Morse Bo’A1A’ Consolidation Liner (C-Liner) somewhere (in Santa Fe warbonnet livery too, Dave) and several Dutch Railways class 1200 Co’Co’s, so I put two face to face and the grainy result shows what I thought I’d see. The driver on the C-Liner very likely had a somewhat better close-up view of the track ahead than his Dutch colleague on a 1200. I thought about that after a remark I uttered during discussing a signalling feature in The Netherlands: the use of dwarf signals where main line signals were actually called for. The situation was Haarlem station platform 4 Eastbound, where a dwarf signal was used as the platform starting signal due to the 40 km/h/25 mph departure speed restriction through switchpoints from that platform in the direction of Amsterdam. Point is that at least every half hour a loco-hauled train would depart, which usually was worked by a 1200, and you simply couldn’t see the signal from your seat due to that nose. Anyway, given the necessity to redesign the initial series of Baldwin/Westinghouse DR type diesel-electrics (suitably nicknamed Babyfaces, picture 3; from the Corel Corp collection)

Mr. Raymond Loewy was retained by Pennsylvania Railroad to design or redesign a lot of their new stuff and he recognisably worked on both Baldwin and General Electric built PRR machinery as well. His first imprimatur on the Baldwin diesels was the RF Sharknose (picture 2 from the Bob Krone collection at RailPictures.Net).

The C-Liner as mentioned earlier designwise turns out a rather toned down version of the sharknose and it is in fact the C-Liner rather than the sharknose which becomes recognisable in the four E2c and E3b electric locomotives from which the Dutch and Spanish locomotives stem. The typical curved-top Loewy windscreens turn up on all US locomotives but in Europe on the Spanish locomotives only. Where at some time they were half-way painted shut to keep out the glare of the sun. The Dutch diminished the size of the 1200 windscreens for the same reason by design.

All loco’s involved work by Raymond Fernand Loewy, a Frenchman who is honoured as the man who worked 70 years to shape America. The livery of Air Force One is from his hand, as is the interior of the Concorde, the Coca Cola bottle and crate, the Greyhound scenicruiser bus  and much about the commercial vehicles marketed by International Harvester. His bureau was involved in designing the front ends of the Dutch ICM intercity stock in the late seventies, incidentally. Anyway, had the sharknose won, then the 1200 might have looked a bit more like this Argentine export version of the RF.

That black thing between the cabside window and the exit door is a single-track token exchanger, incidentally. This one, number 5037, is the only example left and is restored to working condition: the gentleman has reason to be proud. See that here too the original Loewy shape of windscreens was retained, but that crews must have complained about the sunshine: external blinds were later fitted that gave them a decidedly louche look. Like meeting a tough somewhere in a part of town you shouldn’t really have been. Observe the A1A’A1A’ bogies with brake cylinders for the driven wheels only (same as on the US machines picture 2), and the vacuum brake pipe. The truck-frames are the same as those General Steel Castings ones of the 1200 or the C-Liner, albeit in this case for broad gauge.