Ed,
Re: bad job of maintenance
I'll pass on a story that Ed Abbott, a Milwaukee Road Road
Foreman during the Q years and later worked for Metra as road
foreman, told me about Q E units in the late 1960s. The Q was
running a detour on the Milwaukee. He asked the Q crew if they
wanted to run the units. They passed on that and said they would
be happy to have Milwaukee Road crew to do so. However, he said
the Q crew told them these were not Milwaukee Road E units and
they will really take off when notch them out (and he said they
certainly did). He also remarked they were cleanest E units he had
ever been in. In fact, he said the floor was clean enough he could
of probably could of eaten off it. So based on that story and
others I've heard, they were very well maintained.
Maybe Lenny Ohrnell can pass on the story about the engineer
running the Zephyr from the second unit into Burlington one day
due to cab failure in the lead unit. Certainly an advantage of
running elephant style.
Bill Hirt
David,
I have heard that (about minimizing time loss). It was said
earlier in the topic. But rather than assertions, I would like
facts. If you know of some in the Bulletins, it would be nice
if you could reveal them. If this was policy for the reasons
you say, there would be a paper trail.
It sounds like a lead unit failing was common enough that
they had to develop a policy. And it would seem that with such
common failures, both in lead and trailing units, that the
policy of assigning units to trains would have been very
difficult to carry out.
I note that other railroads didn't seem to have this problem.
For example, the GN almost invariably ran an ABBA set on the
Builder, with only the lead A facing forward. GN COULD have run the trailing A
with cab forward. They
chose not to. Was GN doing such a superior
job of maintenance that they didn't feel the need to follow
the Q's example? There were other railroads that kept their
E's and F's in a comparative classic arrangement, rather than
having the trailing A's facing forward, in case of lead unit
failure.
Why do you think the Q was
doing such a bad job of maintenance that they were one of the
very very few railroads that felt compelled to run their A's
cab forward in case of lead unit failure?
Ed
Edward Sutorik
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Posted by: Bill Hirt <whirt@fastmail.com>
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