| Posted by on August 26, 2018 | |
The SD60's were as bad if not worse.....but it wasn't the locomotive.. The entire operation of the locomotive was predicated on a radar unit that was mounted under the front coupler pocket. The radar unit was to sense ground speed and all functions of amperage loading was based on this radar unit. The problem came when the radar units glass plate would get dirty or shiny objects between the rail(sunlight glinting off snow in the winter)would make these radar units ineffective......as soon as this happened the onboard computers would cut the loading to half or three quarters and in some instances the units would drop their load completely. I spent hours and hours riding the SOO's SD60's between Chicago and the Twin Cities as Road Foreman to ascertain these problems. The first thing we did was to replace the square glass with round glass cover and re-angle the radar unit itself to pick up the ground movement differently. This helped but did not corrected the situation......to this day I personally believe that the SD50's and 60's were the downfall of GM-EMD as we knew it!
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| Posted by xBNSFer on August 26, 2018 | |
They were indeed a big part of it; it was kind of a "perfect storm" of EMD producing these problem-prone units at the same time GE was introducing its microprocessor controlled DASH-8 line, which once production units were fielded basically pushed EMD into a soon-to-be-permanent distant second place.
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Great photo, really captures the Gritty mountain railroad part of the B&O. I didnt realize the SD60 demos were touring the Chessie system in 1985. i thought they came about a little later. great reference material. thanks for posting.
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