Cutaway Engines

u25b · **Posted:** Wed Sep 22, 2010 2:14 am

Don't forget sectioned ex UP U28C 2804 at the National Museum of Transport in St Louis.

Wes

John Redden · **Joined:** Sun Aug 22, 2004 8:53 pm **Posts:** 220

Dave wrote:

I wonder how difficult keeping these running was, compared to something like a EMD or Fairbanks Morse.

dave

One of my first job assignments after college was working for a former English Electric employee. Years prior, his first job out of college had been working on the Deltics, which, as I recall, were quite new, and still under some sort of manufacturer's warranty. They were having a lot of trouble with them "right out of the box". He did not have much praise for them, to put it mildly.

One descriptive word that I specifically recall him using, was "disaster".

JR

sleepermonster · **Joined:** Sat Sep 12, 2009 5:57 pm **Posts:** 100

Mechanically, the Deltics had an occasional habit known as "Putting a leg out of bed", which was when a piston came through the cylinder wall. But crumbs, they sounded good. I was at Durham University in the late seventies and you could hear them accelerating away from the station all across the town on the way to Newcastle on the East Coast main line. The harmonics of that high rev exhaust sounded something like a Merlin engine.

Fortunately there are quite a few Deltic power units around; the Royal Navy used versions of them to power warships and the NY fire deparment used them to power pumps on fire boats. Quite a lot of them are sitting in a shed at Staveley (Barrow Hill) Loco where the Deltic Preservation Society has its base.

Deltics had two engines. There was a variant called the "Baby deltic" which had one. This was not a success, a friend of mine who had experienced them said that when starting they sounded like "twenty skips of scrap all being tipped up at once". The other day I came across a group who are seriously trying to make one. So far they have fitted a power unit into an English Electric body shell which they pan to "Cut and Shut" to make it closely resemble the Baby Deltic shape.

Tim

J3a-614 · **Posted:** Wed Oct 13, 2010 10:02 pm

Thought some Deltic video clips might be appropriate here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5bD4_wM ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vLV2rxF ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzgmuI4t ... ature=fvwp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYATxiDs ... re=channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojkAYt0L ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2LgpzeA ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4vE492O ... re=related

Surprised at how much was available; this doesn't begin to scratch the surface.