You are very welcome. It warms my heart to find so many people here who share my appreciation of this kind of history.

I first post every image on my FaceBook photo album and then link it here. I have yet to recieve one single comment on my FB photo album which shows how little the average person appreciates the importance of this history.

Steve

Ha! I posted the link to this thread on my FB page shortly after you started and got several comments. I'm going to print it out and stash it away somewhere.

Steve

Want to exchange FB friends? Mine don't seem to care about railroad history :(

Steve

A number of my friends are cinema projection techs so I'm seeing a lot of photos of perfectly serviceable film projection setups being pulled out and headed for scrap metal while being replaced with digital projectors (which will go obsolete only slightly less fast than your PC).

Someone put me into a couple of interesting groups such as one about old Heathkit electronics and one called Eyes of a Generation dedicated to ancient tv cameras and videotape machines.

But I digress...

Steve

Count me in as someone who appreciates your efforts! I signed up for an account here so that I could properly thank you...

Alan

Well, you are very welcome. It's people like you that make it worth the effort. I'm finding that railfans in general have greater interest in history than your average person and that is a good thing. I'll post some more.

Steve

I'll take a photo of an electronics artifact that I have that was built where my Dad worked and see if you can identify it. Kids today have never seen one and have no idea what it is.

Steve

Steve

Steve, this is glorious stuff. Instead of the suppositions/guesses/SWAGs/speculation we see in the railfan press, here's the word straight from Dilworth's mouth. Thank you for scanning and sharing.

Very interesting stuff.

To me, this story illustrates what made diesel-electric power so superior to steam in terms of reliability. It wasn't neccessarily inherent to diesel-electric power; this reliability was obtained by designing, testing, operating and continually refining every piece of the engine until it was made as bullet-proof as humanly possible. The fact that thousands of locomotives were being mass-produced with identical engines (or at least engines using mostly identical components) allowed, and in fact required, this to be done quickly.

Contrast this with "modern" steam locomotive design in which only a relatively few locomotives of a particular class were built. The railroad's own staff then took over the maintenance of the locomotives likely providing little or no feedback to the builder, except in cases of really catastrophic failures. This must have made it extremely difficult to apply lessons learned to subsequent locomotive designs for anything except very general design parameters. It's apparent that most steam designers really didn't have anything like this mentality for continually testing every part to failure and re-engineering the part to make it last as long as possible.

True, but you also have to give GM just as much credit for applying their marketing & financing savvy as well.

For example they pushed a standardized product and never allowed the railroads to customize their diesels to the extent the steam manufacturers did. You could crawl off a NYC F7 onto a Santa-Fe GP9 and pretty much everything was there. Yes, a few road specific details, but still essentially the same to operate. The Steam Builders never managed to convince the railroads to adopt similar standards, which could have yielded interesting results.

GM also threw the weight of its financing arm behind EMD which helped make the conversion decision easy on many roads when they were replacing worn out motive power after WWII.

The Steam Builders may have been able to match GM in Technical know-how, but they were totally outclassed by GM everywhere else.

Exactly my feelings. We can all be thankful that Kettering took the time to document this history. So often, companies and corporations did not document their own history, and it is lost for all time.

May we learn in our own lives what we may think not important, someone later might think important - especially when you consider once it is gone, you can never get it back. Dead people can't tell history.

In my Whitcomb research, it frustrates me to no end how little remains of over 60 years of company existence. Only one Whitcomb employee took the time to write down a very condensed version of the company history.

Steve

Steve

Yes, consider the case of Alco, for example. Wouldn't it have been a significant contribution to railroad history to interview James G. Blunt, Perry Egbert, Paul Vaughn, or Fred Tromel.

PC

Indeed. But were any of them the ones who ultimately choked on the 241 project and ordered up the 244? Even if the higher up decision makers were around, I wonder if they'd want to talk about it since it may have ultimately doomed the company.

They say the 251 is much more the descendent of the 241 than the 244. If they'd gotten the 241 debugged and went to market with it instead of the 244 history would likely have been quite different. Would GE have severed the partnership and a few years later entered the road locomotive market on their own? And how would a PA/PB with a reliable prime mover have affected the passenger market? Likewise the FA/FB but the advantage for the passenger engine was greater since ALCO/GE's product did with a single large engine what EMD needed 2 smaller ones for and should therefore cost a good bit less.

Steve