Yes, so it might be possible to move a G without a crane.

But perhaps more important is the guys who did the heavy work on these things everyday at Wilmington, and would be able to point with authority as to where the lift points are, the access points, bolts, etc, are likely almost all retired and won't be around forever. I hope in the near future, a G gets moved and whoever does the move documents the process to share with others.

Bob

I always wondered if a GG1 with some different innards (as discussed above) could be be made. With 13 GG1's preserved, an experiment on one would be fine I would think.

Where to run it, Leaman place her a passing siding and the one track is laid on the alignment of the PRR 4-track Broad Way. Maybe extending the ex-PRR track alignment to Lancaster and running the modified GG1 down the Broad Way (even is it is 35 MPH - recall the Great Dismal Swamp accident and the resultant speed limit for 611 and 1218 to 35MPH) between Leaman Place and Lancaster.

Oh well, my dream.

Doug vV

I read this interesting discussion on StackExchange about starship self-destruct mechanisms and the same functionality for Navy ships. An interesting point was that Navy engineers spend millions of dollars planning how to scuttle a man-o-war, of which they have many - and sci-fi show writers get maybe $1000 worth of writer time to figure out how to scuttle their only starship, while having the additional burden of making it look good to the audience.

The upshot is that inventing new technologies is a lot harder than it looks. You may cobble something together that works somewhat, but it's a different kettle of fish to give it the refinement that is needed for reliable operation. Works in the cold, the wet, doesn't start an electrical cabinet fire at the first power surge, doesn't burn up the resistors in point 3, etc. We all have seen conversions gone wrong and many of them wind up in our museums because of that. The same can be said for de-novo ways of lifting or separating a GG1: the shop already knows how to do that. The road to success is to not reinvent the wheel, because, all due respect, you are not as talented or as motivated to practicality as the people who invented it the first time. For those who have heads telling them otherwise, take note of which: this is the smaller one.

Many of us are capable of looking at a machine and figuring out how to lift it. There are four body lift points on a GG1, as illustrated in this photo by where the crane is making its pick: http://www.billspennsyphotos.com/apps/p ... d=99845976

I firmly believe that a GG1 can be made to run again, and done in a way that is reliable and safe. To say that some of the people on this forum are not as smart as those who originally designed the GG1s is an astounding statement.

Those things are even older, and I daresay in far worse shape, than I am. My first encounter with a GG1 was at age five years in Washington Union Station before my family boarded the Steam-hauled Royal Blue for Jersey City.

Hyatt and Timkin sealed bearings were state of the art when the Gs were built. Merely reversing the bearing policy, even with proper repair and the application of $$$$ would probably not be enough to move them on their own wheels. If CSX relented the move would still be far more complex than simply backing a pair of Geeps onto them, undoing the padlock and leaving for Dearborn.

The units are in rough shape overall. The brakes have expired several times over just while they have been sitting in Cooperstown. Ten axles means forty brake shoes with all of their attendant rigging. Then there is all of the springing which goes along with those ten axles. We can assume that there was no frame maintenance in the last few years of service and the frames have been sitting in the weather without so much as a coat of gloss black to hide the cracks. There are an incredible number of random parts that could swing or fall off which need to be secured. Without going through and checking or replacing every piece of hardware supporting springs, traction motors and God knows what else, there is a far greater probability than anyone should be comfortable with that the stresses of movement will cause a completely unexpected component failure. Edwards' Corollary to the Law of Unexpected Consequences, simply put, is that the likelihood of the unexpected consequence occurring at the least convenient time and place is both in inverse proportion to the amount of additional work which would have directly prevented it and in direct proportion to the total amount of effort which went into the overall project.

Even if the resources to properly prepare the units for movement are available and the local Ace Hardware has provided more duct tape and bailing wire than than they have sold in the last five years, we now have to deal with the railroad(s) which will be moving them. They are oddballs on a modern railroad. There are two rigid long wheel base trucks in the middle. Even dead-in-tow they would probably tend to have a higher impact on the track structure than a dead-in-tow SD40 would. The dynamic envelope on a curve is significantly different than, say, a boxcar of the same length.

The person from High and Wide is going to have to route this move from Cooperstown to Dearborn in a way which insures that they won't hit anything, such as an adjacent train or the station platform in Cleveland. Then he has to find windows for the DIM move all the way. After all, these engines are not going to simply be tacked on the rear of Q-whatever. Since he wants to keep his job he is going to be very, very conservative. A special move with two, maybe three, locomotives, top-and-tailed with at least a second engineer in the tail, enough freight cars to insure braking and, oh by the way, a speed restriction of, say, fifteen miles an hour just in case one of the aforementioned random pieces, such a a traction motor falls off.

If everything works perfectly, including crew changes on the fly, that's still a forty hour trip. It will not work perfectly. Trust me, even Henry Ford doesn't have enough money to get Mike Ward to tie his railroad up like that.

We already know (the sixty-second anniversary was a month ago) that a G can be reduced to parts which fit in freight elevator and reassembled later. If they are going to be moved taking the approach of reducing them to Running Gear (two loads), Bed and Body Shell (one load) and Internal Components (X loads) on assorted TTX flats seems to be the more reasonable, meaning easier and cheaper, route.

GME

The issue is not whether a GG1 could be made to run again. Certainly, that can happen, with enough cubic dollars shoveled at that from, say, the same lottery winner that's going to restore the SS United States to its former glory, for example.

The single deciding issue is where it goes to do anything once it's made operable.

And having dealt, by only one degree of separation, with the people at Amtrak that had/would have to directly authorize both the movement of 4876 from Baltimore and the movement of 4935 from Strasburg to Washington Union Terminal for static display, I can tell you that nothing short of a written authority directly from the White House would have to be involved before they would even listen to your proposal.

Now, if you have railfan friends in top places on the Chicago South Shore & South Bend, SEPTA, the METRA IC Division, NJ Transit, the Deseret Power Railroad, the Black Mesa & Lake Powell RR, etc., then by all means, don't let me stop you or say negative things.

Right now, what's driving most of the fantasies is wannabe-locomotive-rebuilders that want to grab the "guts" of an Amtrak AEM-7 that's being scrapped and shove them into a GG1. I was told by folks in Wilmington that "That's not going to work as well as they would like to think." And that was disregarding any blather about frames.

This started with a posting of a funny picture of a GG1 having been locked down. The whole discussion has gone haywire!

I think if we want to discuss GG1 renovation or rebuilding, or Henry Ford Museum, it need to go under another title.