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There are persistent rumours that PRR enginemen attained very high speeds -- well over 100mph -- with trains puled by T1 steam locomotives. (Speeds which would surely have earned the engineer a suspension if not outright firing under railroad rules... which is probably why we only have rumours.) I h...

Sorry, can't give you any informative details or references, but I think it is in the realm of possibility. Steam locomotives were regularly "shut down" (throttle closed, brakes set, engineer off duty) hot: with maybe not the full operating steam pressure in the boiler, but more than enoug...

Note the running gear in the small inset picture of the electric locomotive: B-B-B. I don't think GE used this arrangement very often, but clearly it was in their bag of tricks. This relates to one of the more mysterious stories in early diesel locomotive history. At the end of the 1920s, at about t...

Both were 72'4" long, but the truck center spacing was different: 45 feet on the FP-45, 46 on the SDP40F. (This MAY be a design change to accommodate the different trucks, and may not.). These are both long by the standards of freight diesels of the era, but shorter than the truck center spacin...

In the string on Boston & Maine's R1 4-8-2 (which considers the question whether B&M would have been better off with a 4-8-4), there is a bit of a digression about Canadian National's 4-8-4 and 4-8-2 classes. I expressed a bit of surprise that CN went for a 4-8-2 (the 6060-6079 "Bullet ...

Thanks again! re: generator. GT-598 was the big generator introduced on the U25B. I had forgotten whether U28C (DC) had GT-598 or GT-586. GE seems to have been a bit slow in adopting AC-DC transmission on its own locomotives: they started U28 production with DC generators, even though they had alrea...

Pneudyne-- Thank you for continuing to search out relevant information! If the images are from a September 1965 issue of the magazine (and so copy must have been submitted at least somewhat before that), the artwork was done before there were any U28C locomotives, and, I would guess, before there we...

Wikipedia article on GP9, first paragraph under "Rebuilds" says that there were 31 "GP9M" units built for U.S. railroads with components from older units (and ratings of 1350 or 1500 hp depending on the "organ donor"). So EMD was willing to call a unit a "GP9"...

Horsepower rating of new/rebuilt unit? If it used much of the electrical equipment from the original F3, it might not have gotten the full 1750! And I recall. the choice of the numerical component in designations like GP7M and GP9M that incorporated old components was sometimes surprising....

Typewriters-- Good to hear from you! ... I will now ask idiot questions (to see how badly I misunderstand things). U-series GE units were unpopular with many locomotive crew. One complaint was that they loaded (increased power) very slowly (compared to EMD and Alco units). Am I right in thinking tha...

Thanks for this! There's some (potentially) interesting history behind this data. Remarks: ---According to the old Kalmbach"Diesel Spotter's Guide" (and its successor, "Diesel Locomotives: the first 70 years"), EMC assigned (or maybe EMD retrospectively assigned) different model ...

Just to start further comparisons... The Niagara had 100 square feet of grate area, the 242-A-1 only abut 50. My guess is that a French fireman would be disciplined for wastefulness if he used as much coal per square foot of grate as was considered normal in main-line service in the U.S. So, if we w...

The title is, of course, meaningless: "best" can mean too many different things. Try to specify a bit more definitely by saying "best at meeting the owning railroad's needs" and you still probably leave open too many factors... in addition to complicating the calculation into inf...

It's not surprising that Lehigh Valley passenger trains used Penn Station until LV got out of the passenger business: PRR had major stock holdings in LV, so LV could be considered a PRR subsidiary. It also served destinations not served by PRR's own passenger trains out of NYC, so there was no compe...

JayBee-- I don't know for certain, but that certainly seems plausible. (Given the marine applications of the V225 (a.k.a. FDL) and V250 (a.k.a. GEVO) engines, and the historical production of steam turbines, GE had at least three units producing marine power... units whose descendants will go to thr...