Idle thought on aesthetics

Isn't it a pity, given their penchant for sampling every item on the diesel menu in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that the Pennsylvania Railroad never bought a BL-2? I was looking at BL-2 photos, and, from the long-hood end, they look related (illegitimate half-sibling?) to the Pennsy's P5A-modified electrics.

If form follows function EMD didn't fool the railroads. Probably sent Harley Earl and his boys back to Detroit but they were back and did a better job on the GP30. As far as spartan cab esthetics is concerned EMD peaked with the SD50 to 60 series. GE is another matter and both manufacturers have had a rather slap dash look ever since.

I think EMD had a real winner with the GP35/SD35 body style: economical to produce (virtually no curves!) but somehow uniform and harmonious: they stuck to it with minor revisions up to the early SD70. Their current production... looks like a home-built, put together out of spare parts. GE... I have the sense that on a very small number of occasions GE has looked at its locomotives, found them messy, and called in a designer to clean things up. (B39-8E/C39-8E marked one occasion: cab looks disturbingly, umm, Spartan, but the whole locomotive is much cleaner than the Dash-8 designs.) But they don't do this very often, and between "designer-interventions" design changes are allowed to accumulate in an uncontrolled way, with looks getting wartier and wartier over time. The "classic" U25B was a sculptural masterpiece, but none of the later U- and Dash-7 bodies were as clean.

...It pains me, as a GE fan, to say this, but I think EMD locomotive design, until the last decade, was usually better from a purely aesthetic point of view. Even GE seems to have imitated them at times: the cabs and noses on the W-1 electrics built after WW II for Great Northern were clearly designed by somebody who had looked at EMD's E3 through E6 passenger diesels for a long time!

I was looking at BL-2 photos, and, from the long-hood end, they look related (illegitimate half-sibling?) to the Pennsy's P5A-modified electrics.

Not to mention the GG-1...
I thought of the same thing years ago.

I can't now recall why I cited the P5a-Mod instead of the GG-1: maybe the relatively shorter cab between the "hoods" looked more like the BL-2. ... PRR seems to have hit on that general design for the GG-1 and R-1 prototypes, then "shrunk" it to fit the P5a machinery to create the P5a-M. ... There's a similar idea in the design of the Milwaukee's (GE-built) Bi-Polar electrics and some early New York Central electrics (and the prototype tri-power) (also GE), but the PRR's designer smoothed and curved and "streamlined" it, even before Loewy's further smoothing of the surface: the "chain-guard" on the BL-2 is sharp-edged enough that maybe I thought it looked more like the Old Rivets-R1-P5AM version than like Loewy's more voluptuously curvaceous carbody.

There's an article (by Hampton C. Wayt) in the Summer 2009 issue of "Classic Trains" about the design of the original GG-1 carbody: designed, apparently, by an industrial designer named Donald R. Dohner, who was apparently (article doesn't give precise chronology) a Westinghouse employee at the time, but left at about the same time to start an industrial design program at Carnegie Institute of Technology (which has since merged into Carnegie-Mellon University). He had earlier designed the WEMCo "Visibility Cab" diesel switcher carbody, which (there are side-by-side photos in the article) is strongly reminiscent of the ancient S-class New York Central electric locomotives. It differs from the GG-1 etc (and the BL-2) in that the full-width lower part of the hoods has a horizontal top, rather than sloping down away from the cab windows. Photos in the article show three of Dohner's preliminary plaster models: interestingly, they don't show this slope either, so it must have been a late-in-the-process refinement of the design.