First of all, my sincere thanks to all who replied so rapidly and in
such thorough detail to my query. It would seem that the Dean and
Hanna book is a valuable addition to one's library although it does
appear to be one of the rarer and pricier used books. A quick search
showed US$ prices ranging from 150 @ Ron's Books and 300 on Amazon.
Let me see...how many days 'til Christmas?
Some comments, intended to be rhetorical but thoughts are welcome,
on some of the factual material that Don Thomas in particular was so
kind to synthesize and post...
* I still find it surprising that demonstrators weren't employed to
verify some of the 'number crunching' done by prospective locomotive
vendors. Having spent my entire 34-year post-school working life as
a professional engineer I know that calculations, whether done by
slide rule, calculator or computer (and I'm old enough to have used
them all) are good to a point but field verification of theory is
necessary for large or important endeavors. I would have thought
that this being the first large-scale, main line dieselization
effort by the CPR that they would have insisted on operational
trials to back up some of the theoretical calculations.
* Even though it was apparently decided that two-unit motive power
consists producing 3000 h.p. total would be standard I still find it
odd that B units were purchased although Don's point that such units
allow one to go to three-unit lashups if necessary or desired is a
valid point. I may be making too much of this B-unit issue w.r.t to
the inflexibility of such units. It's quite possible that the costs
and nuisance associated with turning an A-B set of cab units weren't
apparent to railroads until later years. After all, at the start of
dieselization having to turn motive power at the end of a run was
second nature since railroads had been doing that with steam power
since forever.
* It's interesting to hear that it was intended that each of the six
daily through freights was supposed to have 3000 h.p. of motive
power. From the Wells River train-register data beginning in late
1949 that Duane Goodman has synthesized and posted for us it appears
that by that time (which was only a few months since dieselization)
at least two of these six trains regularly had only one 1500 h.p.
unit, a RS-2 road switcher. When one looks at the car counts for the
various freights I don't see that the two trains that drew only one
unit were consistently the lighest trains either. In fact looking at
some of the car counts I wondered some time ago how that single unit
got the train over the road as the Vermont line has a couple of nice
grades on it as I recall, both south and north of Newport.
* It's interesting to hear that it was intended from Day One that
two of the six daily through freights were to be handled by the B&M
because it's not clear to me what power the B&M was supposed to have
assigned to produce the 3000 h.p. that was supposed to be 'standard'
for road power on the Vermont line. In fact looking at the
aforementioned train-register data it appears that by late 1949 at
least the B&M was actually covering, on average, only one of the six
daily through freights as well as one side of the milk. In all cases
I only see the B&M supplying one of its RS-2s, i.e. a single, 1500
h.p. unit, to a train. I see no evidence of double-headed B&M power
of any kind in those early diesel years (most of the B&M's early RS-
2s had MU capability so a two-unit, 3000 h.p. lashup was
theoretically possible). BTW I assume the B&M unit working one of
the through freights operated through to Montreal and then simply
returned the next day (the milk originated/terminated in Newport I
believe).
* As a minor point, the B&M did have familiarity with ALCos both in
Boston and WRJ as they had a pretty good assortment of ALCo
switchers and road switchers. In fact the B&M was one of the earlier
ALCo customers as it had some of their HH (= High Hood) line of
early diesel switchers.
Once again, thanks to all for a very enlightening discussion.
JSH
