Can Control Stand

Our GP10s have the "can" type stand and I like it OK. The little throttle-position window is a little hard to read, however. The rest of our units have the AAR stand.

Automobile Magazine tested a Nissan Quest minivan abt. a year ago and the shifter, radio and a few other functions are contained in an upright pod that reminded me of EMD's can stand.

http://www.3dfinlay.net/gallery/album21 ... tshowcar_1

I thought the same thing when i looked inside that Nissan van.

More to my point is why they did the change in the middle of 9 series production? My uncle worked for the New Haven. Their 1200 series GP9s had the can. As a kid I used to ride on the B&M 1700 series Bluebirds, which were built in '57. The Bluebirds had the new control stand.
In my career, I have run many BN SD9's. The change seems to have been between '56 and '57.
May it have been a gear up for the 18, 20, & 24 series?

I have a pretty good cross-section of EMD schematics and operators manuals, going back to the SW-1 and NW-2 era. I can't seem to find any reference to high voltage, high current switchgear being under the floor and directly connected to (or within) the control stand. All my materials show a seperate electric cabinet (and sometimes both an LV and an HV cabinet) with only low voltage control wiring in the control stand. Or did I misread something here?

How about this thought: given that one of EMD's (and parent GM's) fortes was 'control control', perhaps the change from can stand to sheet metal stand was dictated by cost.

One might suspect that the body of the can stand was procured as a buy-out and assembled by EMD. As another one of EMD's fortes was fabrication, we could surmise that a re-design of the stand as a fabrication enabled it to be in-sourced.

BTW, the fabricated control stand formed the basis of the later AAR control stand design. By then, I'm sure the shell of the stand was made from fibreglas-and outsourced once again.

The only item within the can stand that saw any degree of serious voltage or current was the DB rheostat.

OLG