Well, this is one of those weeks where I can't really think of what to write and therefore have to pick something out of the blue. The world of trains is one where the more one looks the more she or he finds. It continues to amaze me how many variations of the same vehicle designed to operate on top of two steel rails there are in different corners of the Planet Earth.
Today we look at a locomotive from the JNR days
So I will briefly write about a Japanese electric locomotive from the mid 20th century. The Class EF58 locomotive is a joint product by 5 companies, 4 of which are still quite well known today (and they are Hitachi, Toshiba, Kawasaki, and Mitsubishi). She was built between 1946 and 1958, during the golden days of the North American Streamliners.
A picture of the EF58 from the 1980s
If you remember, Japan's national railroad network, until the days of the bullet train, was entirely cape gauge (42 inches). The EF58 has 8 axles, however only 4 center axles are powered. Compared to standard gauge counterparts of the day, the EF58 wasn't really all that powerful, at a modest 2 550 horsepower, however, that number looked just fine if the comparison was made to diesel locomotives of the 1940s and 50s. The EF58 was designed for both passenger and freight services and had a top speed of 60 mph.
This is what the EF58 looked like hauling the Royal Train
Over the years, this class of locomotives had also undergone a number of mechanical improvements and was eventually retired from regular service in the 1980s. Yes I've picked a locomotive out of the blue, however, the EF58's place in history is by no means random. Two (road no 60 and 61) of the 172 locomotives in this class were assigned to the Royal Train in Japan since the mid 1950s.
Suprisingly handsome. There's a cosmetically restored example in The Railway Museum in Tokyo (which incidentally is extremely good) and it was a very impressive piece of machinery, although sadly unphotographable due to the lighting.
Last week, we've identified the Janney coupler and briefly looked at its elegant design. This week, let's, again, very briefly, look at the different types of Janney coupler that are widely used today. I will only talk about the head of the coupler, and ignore anything that the general public may need to trespass onto railroad property and get in a unsafe situation in order to have a good look at. As far as coupler heads are concerned, there are 3 types in used today. Type E, F, and H. Types E and F are used on freight, and H used on passenger equipment. Since the withdrawal of passenger service in North America by private railroads, the Type H standard is no longer maintained by the Association of American Railroads, a trade group formed of major freight railroads, but is under the control of the APTA, the American Public Transportation Association. Now let me introduce another term, slack. Slack is an allowed gap between two coupled up couplers. In other words, when most ...
The NPCU or Non-powered Control Units are control cars used by Amtrak that are modified from surplus EMD F40PH locomotives. A control car is a generic term for a non-powered railroad vehicle that can control operation of a train from the end opposite to the position of the locomotive. They can be used with diesel or electric motive power, allowing push-pull operation without the use of an additional locomotive. Control cars first appeared in the USA and France in 1960s. Trains operating with a locomotive at one end and a control car at the other do not require the locomotive to run around to the opposite end of the train when reversing direction. In the United States, most control cars are modified from retired locomotives by removing tractive equipment and adding side baggage doors and have been used on several passenger railroads. The control cars are connected through the consist of the train by standard AAR 27-wire multiple unit jumper cables. The NPCUs at Amtrak are a...
After the post on the shiny rebuilt GE road power, it's only fair to have a look into what Progress Rail has to offer on their side of the table. I'm using the company's recently-changed, formal name of course. For those who are not up-to-date on the current state of North American railroading affairs, Progress Rail is the company (owned by Caterpillar) that purchased EMD a few years ago. The SD90MAC was arguably the biggest gong show in EMD's recent memory. It happened at a time when they were comfortably resting on their laurels, unaware the fateful changes that were about to occur in the locomotive market in the not-so-distant future (they got beaten badly by GE). What was supposed to be one of the most remarkable locomotives whose presence is to grace the mainlines in modern history, turned out to be an utter disaster (I'll redirect further readings to Wikipedia). As a result, today, the number of SD90s still in operation on a Class 1 Railroad is, if not id...
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