> Erie contemplated a 2-6-6-4 with 70" drivers (as well as a > similar 2-10-4) but went with diesels, instead. > > Randy Brown Uh, not exactly . . . .a small economic event called the Depression intervened. Those plans were made in '29. > - -------------------------------------------------- - ------------ > True, but didn't NYC, a high speed road if ever there was > one, have 2-6-6-2's?? I think they may have used them in hump > service at Dewitt(Syracuse), but they surely couldn't have > spent their entire service lives there. Actually, they could have, just as the ERIE's 2-8-8-8-2's spent their lives pushing up hills. > I think(this coming from a child of the diesel age) that the > speed capability would bear some relation to the driver > diameter. UP certainly runs its 3985 at fast enough speed to > pull passenger trains on a high speed freight main, and did > it during regular service steam. I believe that 3985 is "limited" to 79 mph. As long as anybody's looking. The Challenger class was a speed-demon class, and generally misused by almost all the railroads that had them. The D&H did run them fast once they got up the hills. I've seen NW 1218 run pretty > fast too-in excess of 50 MPH. Perhaps such an engine might > not have run as fast as a Pocono, but with the proper sized > drivers, it should have been able to maintain enough speed to > get over the road without bogging down the rest of the railroad. Those are good examples. And yes, they did run fast enough to 'not bog down' the rest of the railroad. The UP painted some of the Challengers in the two-tone gray in part because they were used on passenger trains. It's true, Paul, that many articulateds were slow-speed machines, but that was because, as Tom B infers, they had small drivers, which do limit practical speeds, and also because many of them were compound machines. That doesn't >>automatically<< make them slow, but it contributes to it. Certainly, the DL&W could have used articulateds, either for pushing up the hills out of Scranton, or for high-speed running in the flats west of Binghamton . . . .or both. Probably not with the same machines, but both. But, they had pretty good power as it was, with the 4-8-2s, and the Poconos, so they had no need . . . SGL ------------------------------
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