US Locomotives - Colton / Cajon July 2013

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[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

I wouldn't dislike those GE tractors if they painted them in a proper red and silver warbonnet.  Orange and black and yellow stripes and silver undre  grundies?  Looks cheap and naff.    

 

Still prefer to see a motley mid-80s lash up.... SD40-2, GP35, F45 etc all bellowing and smoking up the pass

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[Adrian Wintle]

I take it they are trying to cool the turbo on 4894 . That would be an interesting thing to model - running with some doors open (and no, I'm not planning to try it in N, even though I have an etched sheet of hood doors)..

 

Adrian

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The End

 

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[TotalLamer]

Another little fact that I found out from an American engineer awhile back, those knuckle couplers they use are rated at 390'000 pounds, that's a smidge under 177 metric tons of draw bar pull and a consist of these loco's will break them if handled badly or there's to much head end power on a big enough train!

That's a lot of grunt in my book!

 

Before the new GEVOs came out with Distributed Power, coal trains over the subdivision where I work ran with 3 on the head instead of 2 on the head and 1 DP on the rear like we do now.  We run 110 car trains now and I believe they ran 100 car trains back before DP.  On the computer screens even on those older 90s/early 00s-era widebodies, you can see tractive effort... and the rule of thumb was that you better start notching down before you get to 150klbs (this is per locomotive by the way) tractive effort or else you're going to pull a knuckle.  And of course the best part of pulling a knuckle is getting going again once it's fixed... because if you pull a knuckle you were almost certainly on a hill making 2-3mph at best.  I had an engineer one time tell me that back when he was a conductor he once had to change ~6 knuckles on the same hill because every time they'd try to get going again they'd pull another one.

 

With DPs now though, it's much rarer to pull knuckles.