by Allen Hazen
"TRP: The Railroad Press" issue #47 (Oct-Dec 2000 cover date) page 56 has a nice color (dark green and yellow (Grin!)) photo, taken in 1979, of a chop-nosed RS-11 with ... UNUSUAL ... trucks. The unit was originally Monongahela Connecting RR 700, belonging by the time of the photo to another Pittsburgh area line, the Aliquippa & Southern RR.
Caption says it features "very odd General Electric trucks traded in from slug unit #S163." The trucks certainly have a GE industrial switcher look to them: slab-sided, with an outside drop equalizer flush against the slab and small coil springs above the equalizer. At a guess, "slug unit S163" may have started out as one of the big Cooper-Bessemer engined center cabs that GE built for the Monongahela Connecting in the WW II period: perhaps (given the number) the 163, an 1100 hp unit built in 1945. There are photos of the MCRR center cabs in Louis A. Marre's "Diesel Locomotives: The First 50 Years" (Kalmbach 1995: an offshoot of the "Diesel-Spotter's Guide"), pp. 152-154, and the trucks look right.
QUESTION 1: Can anyone confirm this?
QUESTION 2: Did the unit come from Schenectady with these trade-in trucks, or did the MCRR make a truck interchange later?
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QUESTION 3 (connecting with many previous t.m. inquiries!): what model traction motors did the MCRR center cabs have? (726 comes to mind as a possibility for relatively high horsepower units in the early 1940s: the 726, the immediate design predecessor of the 752, was used -- according to some sources -- on dual-service Alco Dl-109 units, and after the war on the first FA/FB-1 and RS-2.)
QUESTION 4: For the sort of work the MCRR did (MCRR was a subsidiary of Jones & Laughlin Steel, and basically switched their Pittsburgh mill), I'd want the heftiest traction motors I could get, and I suspect the 726 and 752 were dimensionally close enough that 752 motors would fit easily into a truck designed for 726: would these elderrly trucks have had their original motors in them by 1979?
(Also posted to GE locomotive forum.)
QUESTION 5 (for older Pittsburghers): When I lived in Pgh, in the early 1970s, the slang nickname of the RIVER was "the Mong" (vowel as in Con, not as in song). Was the railroad always called the Mon Con (as I have seen in print) or was it at least sometimes the Mong Con?
Caption says it features "very odd General Electric trucks traded in from slug unit #S163." The trucks certainly have a GE industrial switcher look to them: slab-sided, with an outside drop equalizer flush against the slab and small coil springs above the equalizer. At a guess, "slug unit S163" may have started out as one of the big Cooper-Bessemer engined center cabs that GE built for the Monongahela Connecting in the WW II period: perhaps (given the number) the 163, an 1100 hp unit built in 1945. There are photos of the MCRR center cabs in Louis A. Marre's "Diesel Locomotives: The First 50 Years" (Kalmbach 1995: an offshoot of the "Diesel-Spotter's Guide"), pp. 152-154, and the trucks look right.
QUESTION 1: Can anyone confirm this?
QUESTION 2: Did the unit come from Schenectady with these trade-in trucks, or did the MCRR make a truck interchange later?
--
QUESTION 3 (connecting with many previous t.m. inquiries!): what model traction motors did the MCRR center cabs have? (726 comes to mind as a possibility for relatively high horsepower units in the early 1940s: the 726, the immediate design predecessor of the 752, was used -- according to some sources -- on dual-service Alco Dl-109 units, and after the war on the first FA/FB-1 and RS-2.)
QUESTION 4: For the sort of work the MCRR did (MCRR was a subsidiary of Jones & Laughlin Steel, and basically switched their Pittsburgh mill), I'd want the heftiest traction motors I could get, and I suspect the 726 and 752 were dimensionally close enough that 752 motors would fit easily into a truck designed for 726: would these elderrly trucks have had their original motors in them by 1979?
(Also posted to GE locomotive forum.)
QUESTION 5 (for older Pittsburghers): When I lived in Pgh, in the early 1970s, the slang nickname of the RIVER was "the Mong" (vowel as in Con, not as in song). Was the railroad always called the Mon Con (as I have seen in print) or was it at least sometimes the Mong Con?
