OK Russell, so what do you have left on your group's To Do List? These photos look like the car is ready for the road.....
I wish. This car belongs to the museum in Rockdale. They use it for special fund raising dinners. It would need a lot of mechanical work underneath as it sat without trucks for years on the ranch and is now just set on some old worn out ones right now. However, between all the museums around Texas we could almost put together and entire authentic MoPac Eagle train and go somewhere.
Interesting that the map does not show the Golden State route into El Paso from Dalhart. When was the connection established?
The El Paso and Northeastern was opened from El Paso to Alamogordo, NM in 1897. the Rock Island Choctaw line was completed in 1900 to Amarillo, Texas and to Tucumcari, by 1902 where it met the EP&NE completing the connection. Phelps Dodge Copper Company bought the EP&NE and it was eventually sold to the SP.
Thanks, I rode the Golden State Chicago/Tucson 4 times 1945-1947. I especially enjoyed El Paso where what appeared to be a GS Class was uncoupled and moved forward to be serviced before continuing to LA.
Nicely restored 100 year old tank car, built July 1916, smack dab in the middle of WW1: IMGP12834_100-year-old_tank_car by Mike VE2TRV posted Sep 11, 2016 at 6:14 AM Exporail, August 20th, 2016.
On Saturday, I dragged this 60 pound beast out of a small ceiling hatch over one of the end doors on the Pullman car we are working on. So far I have the pneumatics working again. I have to rig up a 64 volt DC power source to test all the electrical. Man, everything is built heavy duty on these old cars.
That is a get-serious rugged looking machine. I guess those cars were built to last thirty or forty years, like the locomotives that pulled them. 64 Volts seems like an odd voltage. I understand DC because batteries were a car's main power source, kept charged by a dynamo belted to an axle. But 64 is not dividable by 12, or any other common battery size or configuration....?
I think it had something to do with early diesel locomotives. They required a lot of energy to start. You could only up the amount of current so far before an increase in voltage was necessary. At that time 8 volt batteries were pretty standard so eight cells could give you 64 volts. The diesel's generator put out about 74 volt which was a good charging voltage for a 64 volt battery. So a lot of equipment for batteries, circuits, breakers, lighting and other demands was already developed and available when the passenger car builders were adding all kinds of modern "convinces" to their cars. Some systems used 32 volts so 64 was not really standard. All this old equipment is still quite rugged and can be repaired and refurbished. Thank goodness there are places on the internet where you can find a lot of information to aid in keeping it going. http://www.rpca.com/webpages/resourcelibrary.htm
Hmmm, the steam era dynamos produced 32 volts which was common then. Let's see, if a steamer had two dynamos and they were wired in series.................
Interesting, I didn't know dynamos from that era were 32 volts. I don't remember seeing two dynamos on passenger cars, though there easily could have been one per truck. If so, there would have been two battery banks, one bank per dynamo, with the bank outputs wired in series for 64 volts. The isolation circuitry would have been tricky, but I'm sure possible with rectifiers of some sort.
The lowest common denominator is not 12, it is 2 volts, the voltage of a single lead/acid cell. Multiple cells are connected to make a battery. A 12 volt car battery has 6 cells connected in series to add up to 12. Even older car batteries had only 3 cells for 6 volts. 64 volts is, of course, a 32 cell battery.
No information, but the rails don't appear to be kinked, so hopefully can still be used. It definitely is an odd looking result.
I found the book where the photo came from. But no information other than the caption above. https://books.google.com/books?id=Q...shed near Greenville, South Carolina.&f=false
What I note is not one flat car has come loose from the rail train. A lot of wheels and trucks.. Was it on a down hill grade? What grade is this on? A lot of unanswered questions for me here?
