Recently several organizations have been seeking transition relay settings for early EMD locomotives. Just as a point of information, one EMD Maintenance Instruction ("MI") that lists many of these settings in a single document is MI-6825. It covers settings for EMD locomotives with 567 engines in 1940s-1950s production, E-Units, F-Units, GP, SD, and SW. This document seems to have the most comprehensive single collection of this data, in some later issues they covered the information in individual MI's for each locomotive type. A number of MI's in the group between 6833 and 6843 cover setting procedures for individual locomotives.

It is sometimes difficult to identify which older MI contains particular information because EMD published relatively few indexes that were truly comprehensive. Some of the MI indexes that were printed in recent years just list the Maintenance Instructions that were applicable to products in production around the time period when the index was issued.

PC

By necessity, the current version of EMD is not equipped to support "legacy
product." In-depth product knowledge of anything older than 60 Series is for all intents and purposes, non-existent.

Obviously, the passage of time accounted for many experienced people availing themselves of the opportunity to retire. Yet, there were most certainly other factors in play.

'Customer Engineering' (formerly Field Service) must support current production with a greatly reduced headcount. By way of example, there is only one person carrying the entire load for Technical Publications.

Not that long ago, there was a firm who specialized in product support for shortline and industrial applications. In their 'infinite wisdom', the current EMD management decided to end this arrangement due to the perceived need to 'recapture lost parts business.'