Arie Reedijk, not only a man with a heart that beats warmly for all things railway, but one who did me the incredible favour of selling me Bill Volkmer’s “Pennsy Electric Years” for 17 Euro’s rather than me ordering a copy from the US for minimally 50 US dollars including postage.

Bill Volkmer’s book constitutes no less than one of those missing links in my story about the pre-history of Baldwin, Westinghouse and General Electric locomotives after WW2. It was written by a man who was involved as a Pennsylvania Railroad electrical traction engineer, actually dealing with the E2b, E2c and E3b electric loco’s, and that makes it rather revealing at times. Mr. Volkmer reminds me strongly of my friend Jim Vine, who was electrical traction engineer at British Rail (Southern Region) and who occasionally took time for trips behind the windscreen with me when, I think, British Rail in its death throes during the run-up to privatisation in 1994 just thoroughly bored him. Jim made me do things that (in all honesty) were not actually permitted to train drivers by those in charge, but in doing so Jim did teach me an incredible lot about the ins and outs of DC electric traction, what things look like, the way it works and how to keep it moving in times of trouble. One of the things possible on the class 73 ED locomotives as e.g. used on Gatwick Express, to mention but one thing, was bypassing the entire low-voltage traction control system in case of faults, through manually working the camshaft. For that purpose these absolutely wonderful 1960’s machines had been kitted out with a special tool, kept stored in the relevant control cabinet for that purpose. Opening that cabinet at floor level you were looking down at the actual camshaft and also at bits carrying 800 volts DC, raw from the juice rail. You had to insert that tool into notches on the camshaft to work it manually. After taking his time to explain the requirements, Jim established himself in the nearest cab, rear-bulkhead door open, to ensure the loco and its train would be stopped in time before hitting the buffer-stops and telling me to not drop the tool as that would short out 800 volts DC between the camshaft and the loco frame and that no doubt would be noticed at least by the various local control centres, if not throughout Kent and East Sussex, which would do our careers no good. Seriously exciting minutes in Gatwick Airport sidings, I tell you, awaiting return to London Victoria on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The conductor asked what was going on because of the unexpected move in the sidings that the train made. Bill Volkmer, going by the picture on the rear end of the dust jacket, even looks like Jim. In any case, I’m afraid his text causes a few issues in my book to have to be adjusted and in all frankness I still have hope to one day find something similar about the Spanish class 278 Tri-Bo’ electrics, those little-known cousins of the Dutch class 1200.

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March 2018

Freshly back from a stay in an initially icy cold south-eastern Cornwall, in fact in an old ferry-landing pub with single pane glazed windows at the Cremyll landing at the opposite side of Plymouth across that wild stretch of water called the Hamoaze, to celebrate my turning 65 years of age and now being officially classed as an old codger, I restarted my research into the pre-history of the Dutch class 1200 and the Spanish class 7800/278 electric locomotives. As I explained before, my biggest stumbling block at the time were Chilean broad gauge 3 kV DC electric locomotives of the E-30 Bo’Bo’ and E-32 Co’Co’ classes. Even though they were built in Italy by a consortium called GAI, they had no link whatever to contemporary Italian 3 kV DC practice and were in fact machines that would look fine on US tracks like, well, say the New Haven. Putting an E-32 on one screen and a New Haven EP-5 on the other suddenly brought it all out. EP-5’s, the “Jets”, gave it all away in a flash. Point is not to look at the difference between Westinghouse and General Electric, but to realise that General Electric picked up where Westinghouse left off in 1954 after PRR decided not to proceed with their ignitron rectifier electrics. In fact, PRR also did not proceed with the GE E2b AC Bo’Bo’ electrics. But soon after Westinghouse shut their traction shop in 1953 to concentrate notably on high voltage power generation and distribution as well as aerospace jet engines, Baldwin went to GE for electrical kit and probably took a few now unemployed Westinghouse traction engineers with them. Besides, GE as well as Baldwin had a lot of experience with Westinghouse kit because of the fact that PRR had wanted and organised it that way. So, realistically, it no longer really mattered who you went to, you would get what had been developed by both GE and Westinghouse in the previous years. Baldwin then shut shop entirely in 1954 after missing out on PRR diesel orders (see below), so GE was now the only serious purveyor of full electric traction in the US and as a result all such traction had the same genes after the early 1950’s. We now talk about the PRR E2c (1945), the PRR E3b (1945), the NS 1200 (1951), the RENFE 7800/278 (1954-60), the New Haven EP-5 (1955), the Virginian EL-C/3300 (1956), the PRR 4400 (1960) and the FF CC Del E classes E-30 and E-32 (1960). The pieces finally fell into place.
So, in 1943 we see the development of the RF series diesel-electrics, called sharknoses as far as the look of their head-end design is concerned. They were related with the streamlining of the Raymond Loewy (externally) dressed up massive PRR steam locomotives from 1939 onwards, and brought about a realisation that PRR, Westinghouse, GE and Baldwin all had missed the boat as far as serious development of diesel-electric traction was concerned. in fact, the RF series diesels didn’t sell that remarkably well and one of the reasons was that they were expensive to maintain and not terribly reliable. Only one order was received for export to Argentina, the 50 General Roca class 5000 A1A’A1A’ machines in 1954. Probably the last job Baldwin did in-house before they shut shop. The sharknoses, however, very much determined what the electric locomotives would look like.
In 1945 Baldwin, Westinghouse and GE told PRR that they should look at all-adhesion traction on bogies (trucks) as that appeared to have remarkable results everywhere else going by the speed with which steam traction disappeared off the main lines and was supplanted with diesel-electric traction. Alco, Fairbanks-Morse, Lima and GM-EMD, notably the latter, cranked out thousands of locomotives burning heavily subsidized fuel oil and Baldwin hardly made headway against that flood. What was interesting though, was that a diesel electric in the end was an electric with its own power plant and that economies could be obtained in the region of spares and artisan training and skills if the steam loco’s could be discarded as fast as possible. Unfortunately, Baldwin and Westinghouse could no longer stem the tide coming from other manufacturers and there hardly was interest in further electrification in the US, as explained before. Nevertheless, PRR placed orders for test locomotives on bogies. They wanted AC-DC rectifier units as DC traction had a number of advantages in the way of sheer slow-speed hauling power over full AC locomotives, never mind the interchangeability of kit with DE loco’s. But AC electrification had proven to be the way for the longer distance, both New Haven and PRR (and Virginian) used the high-voltage AC electrification.
The full AC locomotives that GE delivered were not the machines PRR had asked for and did not actually do that well in the heavy haul department (9,800 tons by two units back-to-back). An advantage was that they could be multipled with older PRR units, but that was also not something that would please the PRR financial and operating departments. The Baldwin Westinghouse AC-DC ignitron rectifiers, however, showed that DC traction had it. Two units coupled back-to-back sure-footedly moved 12,000 tons of train with commendable ease. Their downfall was that Baldwin and Westinghouse had not really built the machines as series machines but as test machines, with the idea that they could be changed to full AC loco’s in case the ignitrons didn’t do the job. As a result, they soon became less than satisfactory reliable and in fact within about one and a half year tended to end up on the tracks behind sheds awaiting repairs. One PRR electrical engineer called the machines akin to hardware stores on the inside, despite the niceties of high speed machine-like doors over the front couplers. PRR went to GM-EMD for about 600 diesel electric units and only rather later in the 1960’s came back to GE for further electric locomotives. That were the 4400 series AC-DC solid state rectifier Co’Co’s, based on earlier machines EL-C machines delivered to Virginian Railroad.
The two types of AC to DC test machines, the two-truck 6-axle E2c and the later three-truck six-axle E3b, machines that both had 65 mph as their top speed and were really built as freight sloggers, were used as the templates for the 1200 in the Netherlands and the 7800/278 in Spain. Whilst the template worked absolutely fine for mixed traffic and services up to 150 km/h in The Netherlands (in reality not faster than 135 km/h, 85 mph), the Spanish Bo’Bo’Bo’ machines in Spain were reliable but were heavy on the still often rickety track and, much to the surprise of the US designers, turned out to wear out the curvy mountain track across the Pajeres pass faster than was acceptable. The 278’s ended up on faster lowland stretches where their treatment of the track at about 65 mph also didn’t make the local permanent way people spontaneously break out in songs of praise. That’s why they ended up doing fairly slow local freights, hence my observation that they always appeared to be at the head of short freights.
As far as the Chilean electrics is concerned, the Italian consortium (of which Breda and Ansaldo were members, the Dutch take note) building the loco’s from GE (Westinghouse) licenses, did a very clever thing. They built handsome and reliable machines this way that in fact ended up doing much that the remaining Dutch 1200’s do; hauling specials. They should in their AnsaldoBreda guise perhaps have remembered this when taking on the orders from Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands and really making a bad job of all through sheer bad work.

February 2018

During the ever ongoing research for the book with the working title “Baldwin/Westinghouse Electric Locomotives in Europe after 1945; the pre-history of the Netherlands Railways class 1200 and Spanish Railways class 7800/278” I stumbled upon a website which turned out rather more than usually interesting from the knowledge point of view. Besides, the article sports a video compilation of run-pasts of the Pennsylvania Railroad class T1 and T1a Duplex steam locomotives. I won’t say more about them, but everything on that website is well-worth a look as nothing quite similar to what is dealt with ever rode European tracks (that is except heavy duplex freight engines in France under the Andre Chapelon regime, and these most certainly did not reach the speeds these Pennsy monsters reputedly attained). Apart from that, they were un-American intricate machines. Many pages of illuminating reading matter about the why and how; e.g. read up about the reasoning for the split drive.
In my case the main reason to read all this was the Raymond Loewy developed “sharknose” streamline shrouding, complete with the reporting lights that turned up on the noses of those Italian built Chilean locomotives on the T1a version. On that score still nothing about Baldwin/Westinghouse/PRR involvement has been proved yet but hey, never mind, I’m still smiling. That is apart from the fact, incidentally, that Westinghouse delivered the entire Chilean electrification programme in 1923, including virtually all the traction. And that around 1960 neither Breda nor Marelli in Italy had any experience delivering locomotives of any kind to Chile, but they had experience with Westinghouse kit (but then again, in those post-WWII days virtually everyone had experience with either Westinghouse or General Electric kit; that was as such no big deal). Oh, and The Chilean loco’s didn’t look like anything Italian manufacturers put on their home tracks, yet had a decidedly US ambience to them. And, Westinghouse closed down its activities on the electric traction market in 1953 and Baldwin followed suit in 1954, yet both still traded their licenses. So if you wanted Baldwin and Westinghouse technology for your locomotives, you ordered them from somewhere else based on those licenses. That’s how the Spanish got their second delivery of class 7800/278 in 1960, right when the Italians delivered the Chilean machines. But that’s all in the book
The website is http://revivaler.com/pennsylvania-railroad-t1-t1a-duplex/. The subject is Pennsylvania Railroad T1 and T1a Duplex steam locomotives. The site-owner is Revivaler, est 2014, which deals with all things heavy, explosive, made of steel and, frankly, interesting.

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January 2018

Sorry, from now on at least a Month without. I promise.

1) PRR E2b GE built full AC test locomotives. No ladders but clearly the PRR nose with the mentioned classification light clusters. The European machines really were PRR rather than what is commonly thought of as Baldwin/Westinghouse machines as far as external design is concerned. But the absence of those ladders is strange in the light of the fact that otherwise PRR appears keen to provide easy access to the roof space of their electrics. Or even diesels.

2) Sent the picture before, but it is just to show the alternative arrangement to roof ladders: the bell-pull next to the front cab. Follow the wire and you end up close to that sort of can on the roof. Would that be an automatic overload circuit breaker?

3) NS 1200 cab, driver’s position.

4) RENFE 278 cab, driver’s position. Look at the train brake valve, incidentally. It is a combined air and vacuum valve and is fitted vertically, as I noticed in the case of a number of South American locomotives as well. I know that on British steam locomotives the brake valve in the days of vacuum brakes was fitted like that. But the power control tower for the left hand is undeniably the same as the one on the Dutch 1200. Top weak field Full field switch, lower the power-notch handle. The forward/neutral/reverse handle is lower down again, have a look at the Dutch version. It is the opening behind a pink button with the sign: kwiteren.

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A few more pics from what I use for research.

1) the PRR 2’BB2′ four-cylinder steam locomotive shown before, but now with the mentioned electric classification light clusters either side of the nose next to the head light. This one has an extra fog light fitted, incidentally. In dense fog people on the ground turned out to be less able to see the mile-high fitted headlight, bit of a risk along the line and in yards. The machine is pictured coming down the famous horseshoe curve, an area that PRR would have liked to electrify but never could raise the funds for. Anyone explains to me the economy of this machine over the DE locomotives in the next picture.

2) The original Co’Co’ diesel shark nose passenger locomotive design of a Baldwin/Westinghouse/PRR ABA set in ex-factory condition. Notice the handrails on top of the machine, typical for PRR practice: hardly anyone else had that. Strangely enough the head light and classification light clusters on the PRR diesel sharks never became what PRR fitted on other traction. The forward shining marker lights are fitted in the main body and the numbers sit in the side.

3) E3b Tri-Bo’ 4995 AC to DC test electric with the PRR classification light clusters as mentioned. Notice that the doors near the coupler, mentioned in another email, have been taken off. Although she is in very good external condition I have a feeling that she’s dumped, awaiting her fate in this picture. Incidentally, notice that safety flap next to the front pantograph on top of the ladder.

4) Baldwin shark nose type of diesel electric traction for PRR main competitor on the New York to Chicago run, New York Central, for what looks like a Talgo type of lightweight train. Fitted with the PRR classification light cluster; see what I mean about that vexing lack of consistency that would enable using such features to determine issues?5) Another Baldwin demonstrator with an interpretation of the shark nose design, especially the windscreens give the Baldwin/PRR design studio away even if the machine does not belong there. Classification lights as per Baldwin/Westinghouse/PRR standard but no roof-rails. Am still looking where this is, can’t read what’s on the building or on the locomotive. 

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Studying the original Pennsy E-3 e-loco’s again to get an idea what might have been important for PRR in this new, modern line of AC to DC traction, I ran into a few details that are of interest. These E-3’s were in fact well-built locomotives with detail that shows the care Baldwin lavished on these test locomotives. I posted these pictures earlier.
1) Both locomotives have the nose door with the small grille, which the Dutch and Spanish machines also had but which were removed from all bar one of the Dutch machines to deal with draught problems. Reading the Bouman book on the Dutch class 1200, draught was a problem on those machines and I remember it only too well on the similar British Rail class 37 English Electric diesel electric Co’Co’s that I occasionally worked on. The Spanish machines originally worked into the Pyrenees and must have had similar discomfort issues, certainly in winter, which nonetheless did not obviously lead to any such alterations. David, did you encounter similar problems on your GM F-7’s in the Santa Fe era? Or later types of GM’s that Amtrak ordered?
2) In front of the E-3 4996, across this nose door, there are two connectors that are useful to make a reasonably safe crossing over to another locomotive for staff during a trip. Clearly, these were not always stowed properly, as the top one made marks in the dust whilst swinging in the wind. Like stowing brake-pipe and other connectors, some yard staff just did not care. Have a look at the head-end of the 1930’s P-5 next to the E-3, and see how coupling up and use of this through connection takes place. The E-3c on the black and white picture has the lower one of these flexible handrails missing, incidentally.
3) Look at the coupler of the E-3. Next to it either side are two swing doors that can be closed to hide the coupler from view. But first one had to drop the bottom bit which can be seen as a part-circle below the coupler. Very likely the coupler could be swung aside to allow this closing of the doors to happen. Remember though, this machine was not meant to be worked extensively on passenger trains, unlike the P-5 next to it. A somewhat strange detail which I doubt was ever used.
4) The P-5 is a full AC locomotive that does not have weak-field issues in the traction circuitry. It’s tap-changer that is clearly worked with pneumatic-actuation, though, as the three air connections to run attached compatible loco’s in multiple can be spotted above the coupler. The E-3 loco’s do not have these although they too have tap-changers. But weak-field issues for the DC traction motors made multiple uniting with the full AC traction not possible. Can’t as yet say why the P-5 and the E-3c have only three sockets each side of the buffer beam whilst the E-3b (B&W pic) has four. I’ll find out one day.
5) The E-3’s, the Spanish locomotives and the Chilean version all had that rudimental shark-nose ridge in the top of their nose that ends forward in the main headlight. Whilst the Dutch machine does not have this feature as pronounced as originally it didn’t have a headlight in that position, Netherlands Railways did actually consider flattening the nose even further for driver-view reasons.
6) The E-3 and the Spanish 278 show the normal positioning of the brake-cylinders on their bogies/trucks. I draw your attention to the Chilean class 3000 machines with their unusually located brake cylinders. Also, the E-3 clearly shows the parking brake connection , a lever coming down forward which is connected to a chain going back to the forward brake cylinder. The E-3c shows the same arrangement, but neither the Dutch nor the Spanish locomotives show it. This lever would move forward when turning the handwheel on the engine-room bulkhead in the cab and so tighten the chain, which in turn would apply the parking brake. Looking at this picture the conclusion must be that the 4995 has, at least not at this end, had its parking brake applied.
7) The E-3’s have the same cab-side opening windows that the Dutch 1200’s once had. For draught-excluding reasons the ones in The Netherlands were replaced with aluminium-framed two-part sliding windows. Older scale-models still show these slat-windows, though.
8) The E-3’s of both types have their motor-blower grilles more or less in the same place as the Dutch class 1200’s have. The US machines have their transformer grilles in the rear, the Dutch machine has the resistance grille in its roof-line amidships. This is where the Spanish machine has dynamic brake grilles as well, but the Spanish 278’s and the Chilean classes 3000/3200 have a wilder and wholly different array of side grilles, quite unlike the rest.
9) The Dutch, and probably the Spanish locomotives, have a very recognisable US type of traction control tower to the side of the driver. I presume that the PRR machines had this same feature. The 1956 Italian-built Chilean class 3000/3200 electrics and the Brazilian General Roca Baldwin-Westinghouse diesel electrics had a much shorter tower with the traction controller, full-weak field controller and the direction-switch lever on top. With which their control layout looks much more like the European ones of that time. Don’t know how to interpret that as yet.
10) Contrary to what I thought initially the E-3’s had sand container filling ports in case of slippery track. Look above the Pennsylvania lettering on the side, and look for similar ports on the Dutch and Spanish machines. Weight transfer issues with the fitted equalizer bar trucks made these types of locomotive prone to have the front axles lose traction.

December 2017. Just a few more pictures on the subject of the previous posting.

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1) Co’Co’ 3202 showing its front with the door that probably was a draught nightmare to any pair of knees working these machines in winter. The nose-ends of the class 37 Co’Co’ diesel-electrics in the UK were well foamed-up for that reason. When I was in Utrecht recently and was allowed into the cab of 1201, that nose door problem revealed itself in all its glory even if I must admit that I never heard that draughtiness was a major problem to NS drivers. Incidentally, my NS driver friend Jan Thonen, the man who organised my last trip ever at the controls from Nijmegen via Arnhem, Utrecht, Amsterdam CS, Alkmaar to Den Helder and back in 2005 (all VIRM double-deck EMU), passed away about a week ago at 70 year’s of age. One important source of knowledge of Dutch operations at the sharp end gone.
2) Bo’Bo’ 3017 with a Co’Co’ behind it. Notice the way the brake-cylinders have been fitted to the bogie-frame, very unusual for this US-type of equalizer-bar trucks. Probably the sheeting around the bogies was in the way when fitted in the normal way. On checking with pics of the 278 in Vilanova in Spain it turns out that the bogies otherwise are fully the same as those fitted there. Or the ones under Dutch class 22/2300 Bo’Bo’ diesel-electric locomotives that also came from the Baldwin stables but were built in The Netherlands and in France.
3) Traction motor and transmission. In the light of the story around the Dutch machines (and probably the Spanish, must find that out, actually) we notice here that these were fully suspended traction motors instead of the usual nose-suspension of the time. In the Bouman book about the 1200 I read that in 1950 the Dutch in fact wanted full suspension, but Werkspoor and Heemaf protested at the late change of mind and probably would have charged still a lot more if that idea would have gone ahead. In the USA this would have been called a quill-drive and it was a fact that PRR fitted this to its electric traction right from the beginning. So, looking at this, it makes me wonder what the reason was Werkspoor didn’t offer this straight away rather than nose-suspension of the traction motors. Especially in the light of the fact that Alsthom locomotives came with full traction motor suspension straight away.
4) Clearly, in Chile these locomotives are being scrapped as well. Hope to find a few individuals somewhere in a museum if I get the chance to go over one beautiful day. What you can see is that parking-brake wheel against the engine-room bulkhead, precisely where it sits in two-thirds of all locomotives in the world. We would pull the radio-telephone handset off its cradle and hang it on the parking brake wheel to indicate which side the parking brake was wound on. On a British Rail class 37 that took about a 100 revolutions before they were properly set, but none of the others were that hard to pin down. Later types had electro-hydraulic parking brakes anyway.

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December 2017

A note about progress on the research through the history of the European versions of an American test series of electric locomotives. Unexpectedly important turned out to be my receiving a copy of D. Trevor Rowe’s small Spain & Portugal volume of the Ian Allan Continental Railway Handbooks, to which Chris Hall (many thanks Chris!) drew my attention. A copy was mine through Amazon for £ 7.50 incl. P&P only and some interesting snippets of news it contained indeed.
Any doubt that the whole issue of the Pennsylvania Railroad to the Netherlands and Spanish Railways pathway can be expelled as wishful thinking is based on two issues:
1) A small but fairly significant one; in his book about the Dutch class 1200 Co’Co’ electrics Jan Bouman shows an American artist’s impression of what Baldwin thought the 1200 was going to look like. On this drawing one can clearly see a ladder going up to the roof just behind one of the cab entrances. Whilst the Dutch loco’s never were fitted with this detail the PRR and the RENFE loco’s were. On the pictures I made of the Spanish 278 in the museum in Vilanova i le Geltru this ladder is clearly visible near the rear cab door. Over there it goes nowhere in fact; it would be quite a job, if not dangerous, to get on to the roof from it. If you look at the PRR Tri-Bo’ and Co’Co’ versions, however, you discover that a sort of steel flap covers the top of this ladder. No doubt there was a key (master key, stuurstroomsleutel) that would have to be taken out from the cab to unlock this flap in order to use the ladder and which action would drop the pantographs. Similar to a Dutch driver taking this key out when having the hotel current from his loco connected to the train: taking this key out causes the pans to come down and disconnect the hotel-voltage from the jumper cable, whilst the shunter needs it to open up the sockets on the train to receive the jumper and so enable the shunter to establish a connection in safety. I checked other US electric loco’s for similar ladders on the internet and in the various books I now have, and apart from the PRR E-3’s this ladder is not a common fitment over there either (for good reasons, I would think).Besides, the E-2 Bo’Bo’ test loco’s, built by General Electric at the same time as the Baldwin/Westinghouse E-3’s, do not have the feature either. In fact, it seems to be an unusual and dangerous issue for staff to climb on e-loco roofs under the wires, even with the pans down. So why is it there?A picture of the Indonesian ESS E3201 1Bo’Bo1′ 1.5 kV DC Cape Gauge forefather from 1924 shows a pull with a grab handle coming down from the roof above along the side of the cab. So far I work on the assumption that this is where Westinghouse and Baldwin put the main high-tension overload breaker, outside the body in case of DC-arcing; it is the reset feature after the switch activated. So, on the design for their European derivative DC loco’s they incorporated an outside DC high-tension breaker on the roof as well. In The Netherlands with its fairly low fitted DC catenary a driver going on to the roof for a reset was a no-no right from the start and the Spanish did not appear enthusiastic either, looking at their stairway halfway to 3 kV heaven. so the Baldwin/PRR E-3 AC to DC loco’s appear the only machines that have this feature. But in a roundabout way it definitely connects the European locomotives to the US version.
2) The Spanish 278 is designed very much along the PRR E-3b Tri-Bo’ design in all its designating proportions (except track-gauge and body-width, undoing the statuesque impression of the US versions somewhat) and in many details, even as far as the pantographs and their location as well as the various grab rails and handles around the locomotive are concerned. Bar the double-cab design the Spanish 278 clearly is rather more of a direct descendant from the US loco’s than the Dutch 1200, which was quite thoroughly redesigned by Werkspoor and Netherlands Railways. It is quite striking, though, that the front of the 278 noses were redesigned by Baldwin along the lines of the Dutch fronts. My working assumption is that those loco-fronts needed to be constructed in such a way that the European buffer-beam, with its potentially heavy side-loads in case of sharp curves, could be properly accommodated in the frame fronts. Which resulted in that common wide-nose look between the two and so ditched much of the original Baldwin shark-nose appearance as in the US. In fact, I have pictures of a Baldwin/Westinghouse South American diesel-electric with buffers from this same period, that shows this widening of the nose above the coupler and buffer beam rather clearly and also has quite a lot in common with the Baldwin design for the Dutch electric.Another issue is that on the Spanish machines, that have the windscreens with the top curve in common with both types of PRR machines, the tops were later painted straight across the windscreen glass, as can in fact be seen on my pics from Vilanova. A photograph in a Dutch rail yearbook for 1993 shows 278.013 at Alcazar, fitted with a circular maritime rotating window in the windscreen to keep it clear in case of rain. That picture shows this painted top edge covering the top edge of this rotating screen: I guess those cabs were hot and glary in the Spanish Sun and rain wasn’t frequently falling enough in the quantities that warranted using rotating screens. As an aside, it were the German Railways both sides of the then Iron Curtain who tried out these maritime windscreens first and decided pretty soon that they hindered driver lookout pretty much. In any case, it actually made the locomotive look much more like its Dutch counterpart instead of the PRR version with the curved top of their windscreens.
3) I learned from the book that the Spanish Norte Railway, electrifying their line over the pass of Pajares between Ujo and Busdongo in 1922 with 3 kV DC rather than 1.5 kV DC as the others did up to then, went to Baldwin and Westinghouse for Co’Co’ straight DC electrics in 1924. This was decidedly a freight line reaching elevations up to 1,000 metres, 3,300 ft. So a dynamic brake would have been included to handle the mining traffic. It proves that at the time that the Dutch were talking to Baldwin / Westinghouse in the 1920’s the Spanish did the same. In how far this influenced the Spanish acquisition of the 278’s after WWII when the Dutch were doing the same under Marshall Help conditions is unclear as yet. But given the problems that Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton and the traction arm of Westinghouse Electric were in at the time I could imagine that Baldwin tried to sell the PRR design elsewhere as well. In fact, I read in Bouman’s book that Baldwin came back to Netherlands Railways and offered the Tri-Bo’ design on which they worked for Spain, but that Netherlands Railways found that the (expensive) locomotives were in too advanced a state to start altering things again. On the other side, it would have had the electrics ride on the same trucks/bogies that the Dutch class 22/2300 diesel electric locomotives rode on. I so wish that I could do a trip in a time machine and talk to those people. Not only in The Netherlands but also, notably, in Pennsylvania from where co-operation has been a mite insignificant so far.
So what’s in store next? A) What was the problem with the Bo’Bo’Bo’ design? The Spanish apparently were not enchanted with the Baldwin version but quite a bit later bought similar German and Japanese e-loco’s and the Swiss had a lot of success with heavy haul across the Gotthard using such machines. A rather later General Electric design for low-speed mining railways in the USA, a chopper-controlled e-loco, was a Tri-Bo’ with the clear advantage that the spread of the weight was much better along the entire length since there was no need for fuel tanks under the frame. B) Why was a General Electric AC to DC design based on the use of Ignitron rectifiers selected for series construction rather than the existing Westinghouse design? Had Baldwin/Westinghouse decided to quit the market by then? C) What were the reasons Baldwin decided to go and enter the market for full-adhesion electric AC to DC locomotives on trucks/bogies? Probably the interchangeability of kit on the DC side with diesel-electric traction, but studying the results of all-adhesion traction for higher speeds on bogies/trucks shows that the experience with locomotive-behaviour on the road was far from a mature science and that in the USA as well as in Europe the use of idling/running axles before and after the traction axles gave very good results re running stability. To see what could happen, incidentally, see pictures of the state of the track in France after the 331 km/h/187 mph tests with DC loco’s in 1951. Never mind that arc between the DC pans and the wires, it’s a matter of wonder that derailments of the following coaches were avoided.
And that’s where I am now.

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December 2017

The General Roca South American Baldwin/Westinghouse built broad gauge diesel electric that more or less was the template for the Baldwin design of the Dutch electric class 1200 and to which the Spanish 278 also owes a few details. Don’t let that sunshade over the windscreen fool you. Imagine it away and the 1200 picture gets clearer.