Hi everyone! Hope you all didn't overstuff yourselves too much. Here's the selections. BuddyBurton with a meet Hardcoaler with a Blue Ridge Southern geep and co_riff with a NS geep
Thanks Jim. This was at the South Amana Yard where an extra section of the SISA(Silvis-South Amana) turn(NS Power) met the SASI(counterpart). The SASI left later in the day. The westbound extra was formerly the PESI from Peoria to Silvis. By the way, there was a lightpole that was in the shot, so it got edited out to give you this meet.
I've always wondered why some railroads ran their early diesels long hood forward, and for so long. The New York Central ran RS-3s long hood forward on GCT commuter trains into the 1960s, and Southern ran mainline freights that way into the 1980's. Now, here's a current photo of NS5137 still running long hood forward. I was told that it was for safety protecting the crew from collisions. But I wonder if it wasn't because steam engines had run that way for over a hundred years, and corporate managers saw no reason to change just because the new engines were diesels. Interesting, we never saw those same managers driving their new-fangled automobiles long hood forward.....LOL
Hytec, you're just about spot on. Most of the time, it was for collision protection, but there were some old hoggers that were used to looking down a long hood (boiler). I figure that since road switchers were derived from switchers, where the cab end was the rear, when the road switcher was introduced (RS-1), it followed that the long hood remained the front end. CN ran their early diesels long hood forward, until they purchased two GP35s with low short hoods in the early 60s. From there, all their new locos ran short hood forward.. They still stuck to running long ho0d forward on their high short hood units because their cabs were arranged that way (it would have cost mucho dinero to change a few hundred GP9s, RS18s, RS3s, etc. to short hood forward operation - not much gain for such a large investment).
