Union Pacific Sues Athearn & Lionel

All this is true, but it isn't quite the point I was trying to make. The old Electro Motive Corp, a small time maker of gas electric doodlebugs, brought out the first road diesels, the E6 and the FT just before WWII. This new product made EMC into EMD, going from small potatoes to a major player in the business down to the present day. Who ever was doing EMC's new product planning back in the 1930's picked a winner. The competitors, Baldwin, Alco, Fairbanks Morse, PRR's in house shops, didn't do a road diesel in the 1930's. By 1945, when they could, it was too late, EMD was in the market with a mature and dependable product, and by the time they played catchup, it was too late. Baldwin, Alco and PRR are out of business. EMD is still a player. Picking the right new product at the right time is live and death to companies.

David J. Starr

Another great one: the Bristol Britannia.

You need to get a better source of diesel information before posting to r.m.r. General Motors purchased EMC way back in 1930, along with the Winton Engine Co. The E6 and FT were NOT the first road diesels, they weren't even EMDs first road diesels.

You're ignoring - or are unaware of - the various streamliner power cars built for the UP, CB&Q, BM-MEC, IC, and SAL. Also the Rock Island TAs, the boxcab locos for the B&O, Alton and the Santa Fe, and the cab-booster CB&Q shovelnose units. THEN there were the assorted E units, from the B&O EAs, to the Burlington's stainless-clad E5s. None of which were built in large numbers, granted - but they were still road units that predated either unit you mentioned.

After 1930, it was GM. Presumably they concentrated on diesel locos as that was the only product they had. Presumably they didn't need a crystal ball to see into the future, either.

The Pennsy wasn't a competitor, they were a railroad that built some of their own steam engines, which was a common practice of steam-era railroads. FM were not yet in the locomotive building business, and both Alco and Baldwin had built road units by the start of WW2. Again, not in large numbers, but enough to negate your claim of priority for EMD.

Surely you're not suggesting that the Pennsy went out of business because the couldn't compete with EMD at building diesels?

The success of EMD can be attributed to more than just picking the right new product at the right time - there is no doubt in my mind that had they not dominated the US diesel market during the 1940s, someone else would have. There were so many roads with worn-out steam locos, or that had last bought new steam locos prior to the depression, that anyone with a half-decent product could make a sale.

But the notion that EMD product was new in 1940 just doesn't stand scrutiny. The Alco-GE-IR consortium had been happily producing diesel switchers since 1924. Elsewhere in the world, manufacturers such as Frichs of Denmark, SLM of Switzerland, and the Sulzer/Oerlikon/Henschel consortium had built switchers and road power for a variety of railways.

Good timing on his part - chickensh-t is really in these days, starting right at the "top" of the dungheap with Dumbya.

The number of G class locos is now thirty. I have an idea that EE may have built slightly more than that number of locomotives for Australian railways.

If you would like an reliable, accurate source of information on Australian diesel locos, you could try here:

I've got one slight, niggling argument. The "window" that caused the destruction of G-ALYP and at least one other Comet 1 in flight (and another Comet 1 on the test-rig) wasn't one of the windows the passengers or crew looked through. It was the 'window' for the ADF loop in the roof of the aeroplane.

The outcome, if I remember correctly, was that pressurised aircraft bodies of the B707 generation and later had something akin to bulkheads in their structure to prevent any fatigue cracks becoming catastrophic (this was one of the things that allowed the roofless Hawaiian B737 to make an emergency landing instead of an unplanned plummet).

The (Canadian) Avro Jetliner was an exact contemporary of the Comet 1 and didn't have the same problems with metal fatigue.

On Sun, 06 Jun 2004 19:00:46 -0400, "David J. Starr" purred:

Actually the Comet WAS the right product at the right time. Orders were pouring in for them. Their arrivals were reported in newspapers and on the radio. DH had everything going for it and were assured of massive success, then the crashes started. The same newspapers and other media which had embraced them so fervently now attacked them with even greater fervor. The time it took to fix the problem was sufficient for the orders to be canceled and, by the time they flew again the media had destroyed public trust in the plane. the French were successfully flying their Caravelle and the Soviets their Tuplov and all the UK had was the now dishonoured Comet and the equally flawed and crash prone Vickers Viscount (my Father piled up in one of those) and that forever removed the British lead in airline design. Numerous books have been written on this and this is their general conclusion, the media more then the crashes themselves killed the Comet. The skies are not a forgiving place and there is always a price for learning that you did not know enough to succeed, The Comet and its passengers paid the price to learn what metal fatigue was and how it affected high flying pressurized aircraft. BTW: There was a Jimmy Stewart film about an aircraft designer who's planes start crashing and how he proves it was metal fatigue that did it. the film is "No Highway in the Sky" and is well worth catching. When released Vickers became very upset as it was all to close to the fatigue problems their Viscount was experiencing and the plane in the film looked an awful lot like the Viscount.

cat

The film was based on a novel by Neville Shute, and (a rarity for a film) was very close to the book it was based on. The aircraft in the film (the "Reindeer Mk 1") was more of a hybrid between the Bristol Brabazon and the Lockheed Constellation and had an empennage that would have made flight quite impossible. The procedure used in the film to investigate the cause of the metal fatigue was very close to what the RAE did with G-ALYU to find out what caused Comet G-ALYP to crash.

This is getting way off-topic, but it was initially thought that YP had disintegrated in mid-air due to either a bomb or a problem with the fuel system -- similar to the initial suspicions years later with TWA flight 800 east of New York.

The G-ALYP crash was in May 54. The fleet were grounded, and were strengthened to prevent bombings. They were let back into the air, only to have another Comet 1 explode through decompression in October. Shortly after, ALYU revealed the cause.

Other Comet crashes of the era were largely errors in handling during taxiing, take-off or landing (they were very sensitive-handling aircraft, apparently). All this started to give them a bad airline reputation, and so the Comet 2 and Comet 3 went into RAF Transport Command at about the time that the British Army stopped using troopships and relied on aircraft to move the army overseas.

The Comet 4 went into service in 1959. It had a much longer fuselage and had a capacity equivalent to the B707s and DC-8s of the era. Unfortunately, Boeing and Douglas had got themselves a pretty good start in the intervening years, and the Comet 4's main buyer again turned out to be the RAF, which still fly a Comet 4 variant in the Anti-Submarine Warfare role -- it's called the "Nimrod".

And I'm pretty sure that the Union Pacific Railroad have neither copyright nor trademark over them!

Planes which fall out of the sky will generally be shunned by the flying public and the airlines which buy them. Comet was not the only victim: remember the Lockheed Electra? A fine turbo prop with a little problem with propeller and wing harmonics. A couple crashed than that doomed them as a commercial short haul airliner. Passenger just don't like it when the wings start a-flappin'. But they lived on a the the Orion sub-hunter, as private planes, and a short haul cargo carriers.

Ed.

in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, cat at snipped-for-privacy@consultant.com wrote on 6/8/04 12:09 PM:

I might add that the L-188 Electra II lived on for quite a while as a commercial airliner as well. I flew all over the country on the machines with American, Eastern, PSA, National, Braniff, Northwest and Western. One route that I frequently flew was Miami to New Orleans. It was about the same as flying to Hawaii or Europe as you were over the ocean for almost the entire trip. The Electra was a superb aircraft and could handle rough weather with no sweat. There is a lot of rough weather out in the Gulf of Mexico. My brother flew P-3 Orions for the Navy and has nothing but praise for the machine.

Captain Handbrake

As far as their ruggedness goes, one (P-3 derivative) survived a mid-air with an overzealous Chinese jet jockey no too long ago......

Actually David Morgan the Trains editor wrote in the mids 60 that he had to take a Comet on his just back tour of the traisn in Africa

It is indeed an excellent movie. It is based on the novel "No Highway" by Neville Shute Norway. He knew a bit more about aircraft design than most authors, having been an aero engineer before becoming a full-time writer. Amongst other things, he worked with Barnes Wallis on the design of the rigid airship R-100. He was the Chief Calculator, responsible for determining the stresses on the airframe and other structures. A big job in those pre-computer days.

For me, the classic moment in the story is when the hero, Theodore Honey, pulls up the undercart on a parked Reindeer to prevent it from being flown.

ISTR that the CJJ did not.

One plane that was not mentioned in this thread yet was the Boeing B-377. The B-29 scion sold less than 60 copies to the airlines Why? Because the 4 P&W R4360 engines had a nasty predilection to throw the big four-blade, thousand-pound Hamilton Standard propeller off the engine and into the passenger cabin. A fatal injury every time. I vividly remember one Pan American machine crashing in the Amazon jungle as a result of propeller loss in flight. The US government bailed Boeing out by purchasing over 800 of the machines for military use. If not for that, Boeing might have sunk out of sight in 1949

A scant 56 Model 377 Stratocruisers went to the world's airlines, while 888 military Model 367/K/C-97 copies went to the Air Force. The Navy may have had a few of those

888, but it's not really that important. The Stratocruiser was one of the last propliners purchased by airlines and is also one of the first types retired.

Captain Handbrake

Maybe so, but I can't help wish I'd had the chance to fly on a Super Constellation just once.

Didn't he also write "On the Beach"?

I've flown on the DC6 (over water version of the DC7) to Japan in 1955 and back in 1958; on on the Connie around the same time (I was ... younger then).

The DC6 was a more comfortable air plane to my memory so I preferred it. And my dad worked for Lockheed. Flights were longer then: SF to Oahu, Oahu to Wake, Wake to Tokyo: 26 hours not including the two 4 hour stops. United to Hawaii, JAL to Tokyo.

I flew the Electra to LA from SF a few times; after flying only once in a

707, I was convinced that I hated prop planes: noise and vibration. I still remember the standing waves water in the restroom sinks.

But there was no prettier plane the the old Constellation. Those three tails and the swoopy design were beautiful to behold.

Oh, trains: I also rode the SP San Joaquin Daylight several time between Glendale and Lodi, at least once pulled by a GS4 in Daylight colors in the early 50's. But the SJ Daylight was already a mixed consist of some Daylight cars, others whatever they could cobble together for the trip. I took one ride in 1958 pulled by with PA1 types or E6/7/8 (whatever they used at the time, and I have no photo). They hooked up steam helpers at Lathrop for the trip over the Tehachapi loop.

Ed

in article BCEBE493.15B4% snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net, Brian Paul Ehni at snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net wrote on 6/8/04 7:48 PM:

You do. It is still possible to fly on a Super Constellation. It's not easy. You can't just go out to the local aerodrome and buy a ticket, but you can fly on one. I went for a ride in a B-17 a few years ago. If I live long enough and can manage it, I am going to try to ride in the Boeing

307. As long as the thing can fly and is being flown, there is a way.

Captain Handbrake

The DC6 did operate in the Pacific to Hawaii and beyond. I flew them all over the west and south pacific. But, I am wondering if you meant to say "DC-6" or "DC-7C" In the Pacific, Pan American, Northwest Orient and JAL all bought the DC-7C, which was marketed by Douglas as their overseas aircraft. The C model had more copies built than either the DC-7 or the DC-7B Here is a photo of a DC-7C:

Captain Handbrake