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Ex-Con 90-- Thanks! that's an option I hadn't thought of. ... heavily laden canal boat segments would be hard to haul up-grade. I don't know enough about the economics of the period to know whether, for such hauling, a large team of me would be cheaper or more expensive than, say, a smaller team of ...

J.A. Moldover-- I'll look in my "library" and try to find the details-- I don't remember any 400hp versions being built. (Though my imaginary "comparison" managed it: the last (?) GE-IR switchers were very similar in design to the Bush Terminal units, but with the IR engine uprat...

J. Moldover-- Not sure if it's exactly the same as what you found, but Alco definitely built 300 hp switchers: about seven of them (which I suppose explains why Alco was happy to let GE take the light/industrial switcher part of the market). They looked a bit like HH-series. (Not that they all looke...

Before the Pennsylvania Railroad's line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was completed, freight service on this route was provided by the "Main Line of Public Works," a combination of canals and railways: rail from Philadelphia to Columbia, boat up the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers through...

David Benton-- One possibility that occurs is... cheaper right-of-way acquisition? (Build over existing congestion rather than plough a way through it.) When you say "every commuter monorail has ended up being a white elephant," does that include Wuppertal? (Genuine e question-- I'm not be...

Diesel/battery passenger locomotives have exist4ed. The New York Central had a class of (GE built) diesel/battery/thirdrail switchers, built in I think the late 1920s, primarily for service on th West Side (of Manhattan Island) freight line: they were at least occasionally used to haul short-ish com...

Thank you for this. ... catalogue? Do you have an idea about the press-run for some of these? I would think it would be convenient for a railroad owning one of these Baldwin locomotives to have enough copies of the operator's manual that one could be issued to each engineman likely to be assigned on...

Pennsyfan19-- I don't think I had ever seen any of these: thank you for posting! Do you have dates for them? I don't think anybody after the 1930s would have thought the "Schienenzeppelin" idea merited even concept art. The middle one looks as if it might be related to the EMC articulated ...

The GEVO 6 (and other GEVO models) have been marketed (as "250" (= cylinder bore in mm)) for stationary and marine applications. I have no idea how many have been sold, but assuming that some have, it's probably a "tried and true" engine by now. It's also a "medium speed&quo...

RRATSTJ-- Thank you for those links! ... EMD had extensive experience producing parallel GP and F(*) models: GP7/F7, GP9/F9. So when they updated their technology for the 1959 generation of models (GP18,GP20) they would surely have been able to "shoehorn" the new power packages into an F-s...

Sorry, I don't have much substantive to add, but I heartily endorse the recommendation of "The Men Who Loved Trains", by Rush Loving, Jr. Not sure if it is still officially in print (it was published by Indiana University Press), but Amazon claims it is available in both Kindle and dead-tr...

There is no "standard" narrow gauge: a variety of track gauges have been used for smaller-than-standard-gauge railways around the world. But threeof the most common are reasonably close to each other: ---42 inch gauge (South Africa, other African systems, New Zealand, Newfoundland...) ---M...

Pneudyne-- Re: "had Type E excitation, introduced for the Century series in place of its previously used static type" --------I may be confusing two different things, but I thought I recalled that Type E excitation was introduced a bit before the Century series: Dl-640 (=RS 27) and the (20...

BR&P and R Paul Carey-- Thanks for your replies! Interesting that RPC thinks PRR "was more consistently strict in their rules training and enforcement" than NYC -- I had assumed, with (I realize) no specific evidence, the opposite. On the other hand, perhaps having speed recorders inte...

(The test: 1938, with a brand-new J3a. At qn equivalent sped of something over 160mph, wheel lift was observed, but none was seen at a driver revolution rate equivalent to 135mph. Which suggests to me that on good track a Hudson could probably have been operated safely at speeds up to about 130mph. ...