After reading a few recent railroad books, particularly the coffee table variety, I have got to ask whether the people who designed equipment are relevant any more in railroad history writing.

Such phrases as "The FT did it...", "The PA-1 achieved...", "The E7 accomplished..." all sound wonderful in print but is it getting to be too much trouble to mention at least one of two of the people who were principals in the design of the locomotives or equipment? The flavor of history being dished out in some coffee table railroad books is getting to look like a line by line recitation of a locomotive data sheet or specification book.

It really isn't that difficult to find out who designed something. For example the identity of the ALCO engineer who designed the odd trucks on the "Black Maria" demonstrators can be found just using the internet. So can the identity of the person who designed the pressurized engine room ventilation system for the Electro-Motive E8. Or the man who can be credited (blamed?) for the looks of the BL2.

The locomotive did it? No, people did it. Is there any room for them in history, or is this just about hardware specifications, dimensions, weights, capacities, and counting rivets?

Just something to contemplate when you are writing articles and books or preparing interpretive presentations. The question of why the public does not show more interest in railroad preservation has been a recurring theme here for several years now. Could it be in part because railroad writing has tended to minimize the contribution of people to railroad history?

PC

its an evolution, man and machine.

The BL2 is an answer to a problem of an engineer needing to do switching and visibility. The technology of the time was the F unit, and there were no GPs.

So the F unit engine basics and a body re-design to get visibility, and you got the BL2.

To get a Geep you needed an engine re-design, so you made an economical tradeoff.

Learning the failures of the BL2, the GP came to be. I'll bet the developers already knew this. Its like the Steam Turbine experiments, you hadda try them.

Look at the railroad photographs we look at today. We don't want people in our pictures. Yet when we go back and look at pictures that were taken 50+ years ago, we want to see ordinary people on the platforms, automobiles in parking lots, and railroaders doing their job. Good post. I'm not sure why we shy away from people. Is it human nature to avoid human interest?

Suppose a museum or tourist line would conduct a live action narrated living history "show". Perhaps a simple coupling of cars with a narrator explaining the role of the people involved in making a train run. Explain everything from the life of a brakeman, to the lantern, to the airbrakes. But emphasize what it was like working on the RR in 1935 or 55. It may not even have to be a moving train. Just a parked car or old #98 in the park. I'm not sure many museums have this kind of talent to write, produce, and direct such a scene. I have been to some excellent military re-enactments where even cooking a meal becomes "drama". Anything from explaining the uniform and cooking utensils to explaining the diet, and the complaining by the soldiers of the meal. ( Of course railroaders would never complain!!!!! ). There was no big battle, just the simple telling of the life of a soldier.

We need to tell the story of the railroaders not just the equipment.

Tom

But there WERE NW5's, the EMD equivalent of the RS1. The NW5 had a road switcher carbody, complete with short hood for an optional steam generator. What's really surprising is that EMD didn't simply scale up the NW5 to accommodate the 16-cylinder engine instead of cobbling up the F unit truss-sided carbody in an attempt to improve visibility. But then, we wouldn't have the BL's to love to hate. :-)

Walt Lankenau

The Westinghouse visibility cab locomotives were the switcher equivalent to the BL2, in that an improvement was to be made on an existing carbody design, but instead of a radical redesign they decided to stick with a variation of the old design.

With the road units this meant a completely new way of thinking, eliminating the trussed carbody construction and going to an underframe based unit with a non structural hood.

With the switcher it meant completely abandoning the boxcab design and going with a raised end cab and non structural hood. The BL2 and visibility cabs both got the ball rolling in the right direction, it took another nudge to go the rest of the way.

BTW, Dave Hershberger at Westinghouse was the man behind the Visibility Cab innovation.

I'm not sure how the BL2 "got the ball rolling." Not when the RS1 and progeny and some of the Baldwin products were out there, already representing the perfected roadswitcher design. EMD simply needed to go make their own version which they eventually did.

Aside from the lower noses that came years later, and the safety cabs that came later still, the design was already in full form well before the BL2 which contributed nothing to the evolution of the roadswitcher other than giving rise to stories that EMD just didn't want to cannibalize F unit sales. What was a GP7 other than EMD's version of a concept devised by others? What was left was only for EMD to improve it with their machinery, renown for reliability and serviceability not to mention compatibility & familiarity with what many/most railroads already had.

Steve

It was more of an EMD decision to go half way with the BL2 and not an industry decision. Could this be an example of "in the box" thinking by the people at EMD?

I suspect the BL-1 and BL-2 were a stop-gap measure. EMD certainly proved they could copy ALCO's RS-1 with the NW-5 of 1947, but hey, that was essentially a copy of a six or seven year old design. The "horsepower race" was starting, and EMD wanted to field a road switcher that had full road locomotive HP rating, as both ALCO and BALDWIN were introducing, but that would require either a totally new frame, or a modification to the trussed body design. The later was the fastest way to get there, and resulted in the BL-1. However, the former was the better way to do it, and resulted in the GP-7, and all the road switchers from then until the present day.

I suspect that even as the erecting shop was fitting the sheet metal to those ridiculous body trusses, the drawings for the GP-7 frame were already taking shape up in engineering, leaving the BL series as an evolutionary dead end; the appendix of the locomotive world.

My reaction to the original question:

"Oh, come on...."

The personification of an inanimate object or group entity is a well-known, perhaps overused literary device hardly unique to writing about locomotives. I've seen similar analogies made for the DC-3 airplane, the computer mouse, the cell phone, Kodak cameras, etc. Listen to folks talk about "their" sports team, even if they've never set foot in the stadium, let alone the locker room or the owner's office.

Part of the problem, from a historical and public-awareness standpoint, is that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." There is a record and TV producer in the UK, Peter Waterman, that arguably has become richer than, and has had more influence on the industry than, Virgin Records' Richard Branson. But because Branson has been something of a publicity hound and marketing maven, staging any number of audacious publicity stunts and engaging in adventuresome aeronautics, "everyone's" heard of Branson, whereas Waterman has kept a relatively lower profile except in the UK. (And collecting lots of vintage locomotives as well.)

Historians run into a lot of that in technical history. It's WAY too easy to say "Edison invented the light bulb" when, of course, it was a development of many people and much trial and error. Edison also got his name out there for decades, just as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did a century later. Gates sure as heck didn't "invent" the PC or Windows or graphic-user-interface, but he succeeded better than the competition in getting his name attached to his work. Ditto Jobs and Apple/Mac. Meanwhile, there's no common name attached to the concept of "inventing" television, or the microwave oven, photography, or indoor plumbing. Matthew Brady was one of many contract photo studios doing work for the government in the Civil War; his post-war marketing means we've heard of him, and even assume that many battle scene photos were taken by him alone and not his own hired help or even a different studio.

Railroads and their suppliers, by and large, have almost never engaged in such "personification" of specific developments, aside from the obvious one of a company name like Baldwin or Lima. Even the most well-known name in modern railroad technology--Raymond Loewy--is as much a product of that man's marketing as it is his minor tweaks to an existing GG1 design. (Heck, there's still a Raymond Loewy Foundation marketing his legacy with a gallery and website to this day!) In the U.K. and elsewhere, however, there was indeed publicity and marketing behind the names of chief mechanical engineers such as Gresley, Stanier, Ivatt, Brunel, Chapelon, and others.

Pop quiz: Who designed/built/was responsible for the SP GS-4? The UP Big Boy? The N&W J and A? The EMD F40PH? The GE Evolution series? The TGV or Acela? Or, for that matter, the Mazda Miata? The Boeing 747?

Either a) we don't know and care; b) the people responsible won't tell us or market themselves in the way others did, or c) we know, deep down, that there are hundreds or thousands involved with the incremental changes and advancements, and that no one name suffices.

You bring up an interesting point. Lowey did not design the GG1. Some engineer at the PRR developed the GG1's lines when he modified the boxcab P5's carbody for increased visibility. Loewy merely removed the rivets and designed a paint job.

I don't think there have been many true inventions that sprung up out of nowhere, most of the major inventions were being worked on by several competing people at one time. Its a combination of need and ability, working on the backs of existing inventions that result in a new invention. I do not believe the fallacy that if a certain key figure had not been born that his contributions would not have been made. Someone else would have stepped in to do it.

There was a fairly good article in Classic Trains a few issues ago that makes a strong case that it wasn't someone at PRR who designed the GG1, but a Westinghouse engineer. I don't have the issue handy, but it may have been the same person who designed the visibility cab switcher.

Hmmm, now that is interesting! Looks like it may have been the Summer, 2009 issue?


"The new Classic Trains is out here in the U.S., mostly devoted to Donald Dohner's most successful locomotive design, the Pennsylvania GG1.
Most people haven't heard of him, of course. Raymond Loewy changed the paint scheme and changed the design from a riveted skin to a welded body, but the lines are the same as the first GG1.
Cutaway drawings, a historical overview, road stories; it's all here. America's finest electric engine, inside a single folded cover."

It is the Summer 2009 issue. The article is titled "Donald Dohner: The Man Who Designed "Rivets"

So it's not the same person, but if I remember correctly, Doehner is the guy responsible for several other early diesel designs.

Yeah, when Classic Trains blurbed an article about who really designed the GG1 I was hoping it would be a discussion about the overall mechanical details, not the cosmetic ones. But that's an examination that is yet to be.

Steve

Some very good points came up in this discussion and I see some of the usual negative comments.

"Could it be in part because railroad writing has tended to minimize the contribution of people to railroad history?"

This is one of the important points to come up on this thread. Having an interest in boating, especially wooden boats, not only is the designer of many classics known, the builder is also known. The history or background of the design is generally known as well. Going back to automobiles, some key design considerations within GM for example have a direct tie back to an individual. Its a part of the story which makes it that much more interesting. I have owned MGs and Jaguars, and again the designers and engineers are fairly well documented.

Today, we see a large locomotive relic sitting in a museum and the history shown generally states what railroad it may have come from (no doubt long gone in most cases) and what company built it (also long gone). To today's museum visitors, I think it comes out to "who cares?"

But going back to the people angle, who really built the engine? Who really ran it? Where was it repaired? How was it repaired? By whom? Why is it different from another?

Such answers may bring a rather boring locomotive display (ask my kids, the displays are boring) back into relevancy for the museum visitor.

Another example. For a time I owned Porter #7197. Just a small fireless cooker really. Who cares, right? But then we started to dig into its history. Where it ran originally. How much it cost new. How much it would cost to replace it new in the 1950s. Who ran it. What it was like to run it. What was the mechanic thinking when he welded the cross head to the piston rod. Who else owns similar engines. We developed an attachment to the little pot. It had a story to tell which eventually helped bring her back "home" to Arizona this past Fall.

I am fairly certain that, just like wooden boats and cars, there are key people behind every locomotive design who's story would make any display more interesting.

J.R. May