ALCO and NASA

[ex Budd man]

Tonight (Sunday) I was watching Dirty Jobs on cable and Mike Rowe was servicing the crawler used to move the space shuttle to launch position. It is propelled by two 251 V-16 Alco engines. They each drive two 1,000 KW generators for traction power. Kinda gives Alco fans bragging rights over EMD, FM, and GE guys.

[Railjourner]

I've seen that episode before but started watching it tonight because there was nothing better on and for the first time I heard them briefly mention Alco and the 251's. "ALCO" big as Dallas painted above each cylinder. These engines have probably been powering this crawler since Apollo and perhaps Gemini and likely will bring the first Aries rockets to the pad and who knows maybe even a rocket to Mars some day . This raises an interesting question for me. I know some 20,000 contractors worked on the Apollo program. I wonder if Alco worked on any other projects for Apollo?

Edit: Just did a quick Wiki and it says that the crawler-transporter's engines will be upgraded after the shuttle retires in 2010. Also both crawlers were delivered in 65 and weren't used by Gemini.

[Nova55]

They just put brand new 251s in that thing about 2 years ago...I have the press release somewhere..

[Alcoman]

I suspect what they mean by "upgrading" is to increase the horsepower. They can increase it to about 4,000 hp if they change out components to make it a 251F engine. I am not sure if they will need to change out the blocks to a heavier version.