Serious technical question: if I can understand the answer's details, I'll understand more about locomotive electricals than I do now! But it's a rather weird question, so to set the scene I'll do a bit of "alternative history," a.k.a. "fantasy"…
… It's 1956. The top management of the Royal Railways of Ruritania, along with their political masters in the Ruritanian government, have decided to modenize with diesel-electric locomotives of basically American style. They have decided (shades of the roughly contemporaneous British Railways Modernization Scheme!) that the locomotives will be built in RRR workshops, to designs drawn up by Ruritanian engineers. Ruritanian heavy industry, however… has no large firms experienced in heavy electricals or diesel engine building, so they will import the engines and electrical components (about 2/3 of the locomotive by cost) from the United States. (A number of Australian state railways made similar decisions…)
But remember, they are not going to build locomotives to imported blueprints! They can mix-or-match components from different suppliers.
For the electricals (generators, traction motors, control systems…), the choice is easy: GE's stuff is the best in the business. On the other hand, the diesel engines that would go with it, if they were buying whole locomotives (Alco 251, Cooper-Bessemer FVBL), are fairly new and without much in the way of a frequency-of-repair track record. (Thats who I chose th date for the story: Dl-701 and UD18B both introduced new engines to the market.) Ruritania -- I don't know where it is, but let's imagine it sits on oil fields -- anticipated cheap oil for the foreseeable future, and so wan't terribly concerned with the efficiencies of 4-cycle engines… To make a long story short, they decided to use the EDM 567-C engine. (Pause, now, while people try to imagine what the finished locomotives will look like: maybe something like the C&O' SD-18 on Alco trucks?) After all, this is the most widely used locomotive engine in the world, and even its most recent iteration, the C crankcase, has two years of service experience.
So now the question. What traction generator will they buy from GE? General Electric designed the GT-567 for use with the Fairbanks-Morder opposed piston diesel: it was used on the Erie-Built units, and on late FM road switchers (and some of the last, Canadian, FM C-liner streamlined cabs). The FM engine seems to me to have broadly similar characteristics to the EMD diesel, including a full-power rpm in the same ballpark. And I know that railroads the re-engined Erie-builts with EMD prime movers kept (all of them?) the original generators. So, my question is: is the GT-567 a good enough fit for the EMD 567 that GE would happily supply it for several hundred new-build locomotives, or would they recommend going for a modified design that would differ enough to merit a new type-number ("GT-568"????)?
… It's 1956. The top management of the Royal Railways of Ruritania, along with their political masters in the Ruritanian government, have decided to modenize with diesel-electric locomotives of basically American style. They have decided (shades of the roughly contemporaneous British Railways Modernization Scheme!) that the locomotives will be built in RRR workshops, to designs drawn up by Ruritanian engineers. Ruritanian heavy industry, however… has no large firms experienced in heavy electricals or diesel engine building, so they will import the engines and electrical components (about 2/3 of the locomotive by cost) from the United States. (A number of Australian state railways made similar decisions…)
But remember, they are not going to build locomotives to imported blueprints! They can mix-or-match components from different suppliers.
For the electricals (generators, traction motors, control systems…), the choice is easy: GE's stuff is the best in the business. On the other hand, the diesel engines that would go with it, if they were buying whole locomotives (Alco 251, Cooper-Bessemer FVBL), are fairly new and without much in the way of a frequency-of-repair track record. (Thats who I chose th date for the story: Dl-701 and UD18B both introduced new engines to the market.) Ruritania -- I don't know where it is, but let's imagine it sits on oil fields -- anticipated cheap oil for the foreseeable future, and so wan't terribly concerned with the efficiencies of 4-cycle engines… To make a long story short, they decided to use the EDM 567-C engine. (Pause, now, while people try to imagine what the finished locomotives will look like: maybe something like the C&O' SD-18 on Alco trucks?) After all, this is the most widely used locomotive engine in the world, and even its most recent iteration, the C crankcase, has two years of service experience.
So now the question. What traction generator will they buy from GE? General Electric designed the GT-567 for use with the Fairbanks-Morder opposed piston diesel: it was used on the Erie-Built units, and on late FM road switchers (and some of the last, Canadian, FM C-liner streamlined cabs). The FM engine seems to me to have broadly similar characteristics to the EMD diesel, including a full-power rpm in the same ballpark. And I know that railroads the re-engined Erie-builts with EMD prime movers kept (all of them?) the original generators. So, my question is: is the GT-567 a good enough fit for the EMD 567 that GE would happily supply it for several hundred new-build locomotives, or would they recommend going for a modified design that would differ enough to merit a new type-number ("GT-568"????)?