New Releases: 2/17/16

[22alpha]

No you can still get it, just not with a discount. It would be full price after Sunday.

Thanks.

Mike

 

[norfolksouthern37]

Does it have 2 control stands ... one for short hood forward running too ?

no this was not as common as is often believed. NW did this on some locomotives early on and there are some real early diesels that had this on other roads and specialty units but not these. SOU was pretty much always a single control, long hood forward from the SD45 on. (NS corp was controlling SOU by the time these C39-8s came on the scene). There are NW versions of the C39-8 too with slight differences but even those are single control like these.

 

[DominikB]

no this was not as common as is often believed. NW did this on some locomotives early on and there are some real early diesels that had this on other roads and specialty units but not these. SOU was pretty much always a single control, long hood forward from the SD45 on. (NS corp was controlling SOU by the time these C39-8s came on the scene). There are NW versions of the C39-8 too with slight differences but even those are single control like these.

what was the advantage of long hood forward?

 

[cascaderailroad]

So they could pretend that they were a GG1 :hehe:

For collision protection ... but it must have taken a keenly attentive conductor to watch the other side, and must have been awfully hard to see what you were doing with that hood blocking your view

In the wayback days there were oftentimes 5 men crews on a train, 2 in the caboose

 

[MeowRailroad]

I have heard that long hood forward/high hoods were brought about as a union agreement so that the engineer would need a conductor to see on the other side of the engine. If there's a short hood, he can see across it. But with a long hood or high hood, it blocks their view so they need a conductor to see. I think that the collision safety wasn't the original reason, but just an added benefit. In other cases, long hoods were set up so that the train crew would feel more at home if they were used to running steam engines.

 

[boc61]

Normally, the long hood is the rear of the locomotive. For early hood unit models, this was not the case; railroads preferred to run with the long hood at the front and the cab at the rear (referred to as operating long hood forward or LHF). It is a common misconception that locomotives were run LHF to provide greater protection, although it may have been a secondary benefit. Southern Railway and Norfolk and Western Railway operated their locomotives bidirectionally to make coal shifting more efficient. By putting the engineer on the right side with the Long Hood Forward, the engineer could see signals down the long hood and around the short hood for operations in both directions. [SUP][1][/SUP] Later, preferences changed to having the short hood at the front and the long hood at the rear for better visibility and with the advent of Wide, or Comfort, cabs. Visibility became a deciding factor when more powerful engines required larger, visibility-obscuring radiator units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_hood

 

[Chadd04]

I think a modern c39-8 would look good in the South Bay scheme.

 

[CJLIStrickland]

I agree with Chad and raise that to PVR colors old or new!