End of Service for VGN EL-2B Streamliners

NW Mailing List nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org
Thu Oct 25 11:54:50 EDT 2012

Dave,

Your mention of the New Haven Class EP-5 electric locomotives reminds me of a story about them that I heard from a fellow Mechanical Engineering student at VPI (now Virginia Tech) in the 1955-56 time frame. He was Gerald Healy (spelling?), who had worked in GE's Locomotive and Car Equipment Department at Erie, PA, but who had just recently left to go back to school.

He said that the first EP-5 to be completed was tested on GE's test track there with a number of important observers to witness the event. Initially, the light locomotive was run back and forth on the test track and performed beautifully. Then someone noticed ten loaded cars of coal on the powerhouse track and suggested that the new locomotive be coupled to them and pull them up and down the track.

According to Gerald, after the air was pumped up on the cars and the brakes released, the engineer pulled back on the controller handle to start the train, but the locomotive just made a strange noise and could not budge the ten cars! He said there was consternation among the observers that this supposedly powerful locomotive could not pull 10 loaded cars!

As Gerald explained it, these locomotive used mercury arc rectifier tubes to convert the AC from the trolley wire to DC for the traction motors (like the VGN EL-C's), and they had "smoothing reactors" to smooth out the rectified current. The problem was that the reactors were placed near the rectifier tubes and the reactors developed a magnetic field somewhat proportional to the current passing through them. When the locomotive was operating light, the current was low enough that the magnetic field of the reactors created no problem, but when the current was increased in the attempt to start the ten loaded cars, the magnetic field of the reactors was sufficient to extinguish the arc in the nearby rectifier tubes! Obviously, some "fix" was made for this problem.

Your quote of the remark by the New Haven folks that "GE had learned a lot about packaging the rectifier equipment since the EP-5's" appears to lead credence to what Gerald told me.

Incidentally, after VPI I was drafted into the Army and eventually assigned to the Signal Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, where I was assigned to a radio interference suppression section. One assignment, in company with a civilian engineer, was to GE at Erie to run interference tests on a "universal" diesel locomotive that GE had built for the US Army. This locomotive could be adapted to various track gauges, various coupler arrangements and either air or vacuum brakes. We set up our receivers along the test track and checked the unit for compliance with military radio interference specifications. I even got a short ride on the test track. I heard later that this locomotive saw service on the Rio Grande narrow gauge, but I have often wondered about its ultimate disposition.

While traveling out of Ft. Monmouth I took advantage of assignments like this to ride trains whenever possible. For the Erie trip I took a PRR train on the New York & Long Branch RR from Red Bank (near Ft. Monmouth) to Newark, NJ where I transferred to the Newark Lackawanna station for a ride on the DL&W's Phoebe Snow to Buffalo, NY, a fine trip except for the business car coupled to the rear of the lounge car, blocking the view to the rear. Buffalo to Erie was on the Nickel Plate Road. As I rode over this track on the NKP passenger train I had no inkling that some twenty years later I would be operating diesel locomotives and hauling freight over these same tracks! The occasion was the 82-day N&W Clerk's strike of 1978, which saw many N&W employees pressed into unfamiliar service to keep the freight moving. During that time I logged some 11,000 miles running locomotives over the 248 miles of old NKP main line between Bellevue, OH and Buffalo.

The return trip from Erie was the same at the extremities, but instead of returning on the DL&W I substituted a ride on the NYC's Empire State Express where I had an unobstructed view out the rear of the lounge car on the Water Level Route. This lounge car even had a short rearward facing bench seat at the rear windows for those people (like me) who wanted to see the railroad without getting a crick in their neck.

Gordon Hamilton

----- Original Message -----
From: NW Mailing List
To: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 12:27 PM
Subject: Re: End of Service for VGN EL-2B Streamliners


Stewart:

You're thinking of what Vgn called the EL-C. The EL-2b's were the two-unit (back to back) "streamliners." They had 25 Hz to DC motor-generator sets to feed DC to their traction motors.

The rectifiers went straight from N&W to the New Haven in the summer of 1963, NH arranged for a service engineer from the GE New York office to come to New Haven and check them out. As it happened, that summer was when I was doing my three-month field assignment as part of my 21-month rotating training assignments for what was then the Locomotive and Car Equipment Department of GE, and I had been assigned to the NY Office for that assignment (which was very convenient because we were living on Long Island at the time). I was invited to come along for the inspection, which was a great experience. The New Haven folks remarked that "GE had learned a lot about packaging the rectifier equipment since the EP-5's."

Dave Phelps

In a message dated 10/21/2012 9:11:57 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org writes:
Hi Group, please forgive the ignorance of a Yankee member.- Were the VGN EL-2b's, the "hood style" rectifier locomotives delivered by General Electric to the VGN? If so, some of them came to the New Haven Railroad, probably in the 1960's and probably by way of General Electric-Erie Works. They passed from the New Haven into Penn Central then into Conrail. I'm a member of the Railroad Museum of New England and the museum owns one of the units in very faded Conrail blue and minus it's main transformer due to it's concentration of PCB's in the transformer oil. It will never run again, there's no main transformer and the 20 mile Naugatuck Railroad subsidiary of the museum has absolutely no centenary.
Stewart Fritts
----- Original Message -----
From: NW Mailing List
To: NW Mailing List
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 9:39 PM
Subject: Re: End of Service for VGN EL-2B Streamliners


Sorry I can't answer all your inquiries about the EL2b's. I do have a note, of which I do not remember the source, that says the EL2b's were scrapped at the Peck Iron
& Metal Co. in south Richmond. Maybe this will jog someone's memory with the details.

Jeff Sanders


From: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
To: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org
Sent: Friday, October 5, 2012 1:59 PM
Subject: End of Service for VGN EL-2B Streamliners


I've seen several accounts of the end of the EL-2Bs which say they were taken out of service and scrapped between 1959 and 1962. The early date is clearly incorrect as McClure and Plant show several pictures in their book of these motors in service into at least Oct. 1960. Can anyone clear up the history of the final days of the EL-2Bs? When were they actually taken out of service? Were they stored for a while before disposal? Were they sent back to General Electric or were they scrapped by some local company? If so, who, when and where? Many thanks for your help.

Tom
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