As a former EMD engineer, I can't say what GE's thoughts were when developing the C4, however, if you look at their steerable truck and the C4 weight shifting truck, you can see the steering mechanism and the weight shifting mechanism occupy the same space. So without a major redesign of the steerable truck linkage mechanism, it's not possible to combine the two. Using air pressure to actuate the weight shifting mechanism requires a lot of piston area so fitting that in any other fashion than they've done is difficult. Besides, their major customer for the C4 hasn't bought steerable trucks.
Railroad Forums
B-B unit sales
- Discussion of General Electric locomotive technology. Current official information can be found here: www.getransportation.com.
My thought was a B1-1B arrangement with the steerable truck and negating the weight shifting appurtenance.
Last edited by MEC407 on Tue Jul 24, 2018 9:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: unnecessary quoting
Getting pretty far from the topic of B-B units, but... My sense is that GE's "steerable" truck is losing popularity. Two of the railroads that bought large numbers of AC44/ES44 with steerable trucks, CP and CSX, seem to have switched to "conventional" trucks for their latest orders. The steerable truck has, I think, slightly better performance in very high adhesion applications, but is doubtless more expensive to buy and more expensive to maintain.