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51

Putting any new design of electric or diesel-electric locomotive into service is usually accompanied by a few headaches at the very best and these switchers were no exception, particularly in view of their having some very novel features.  As I look back on it, we were probably lucky not to have had considerably more trouble than we did.  But we had enough.  I made several trips to New Haven and Boston that fall in connection with all this.  We had Harry Craig stationed in New Haven looking out for the service work there while we had two Boston Office service engineers handling it there--Neil Donovan and Andy Johnson--both of whom I was to work with extensively not long afterward in the promotional campaign on small diesels in New England.

Mechanically, we had little trouble.  There was a flurry of loose bushings in the brakework which soon evaporated.  There were a few leaky radiators, particularly in the oil sections but that was corrected promptly.  The brake pipes had to be lengthened three-inches to avoid pulling the brake hoses off on a certain sharp curve in Lamberton Street Yard in New Haven.  But this kind of thing was minor and nobody worried about it.  Electrically, we had some motor and generator flash-overs due probably to excessive wheel slipping but this was par for the course, particularly with our extremely high-speed, double-reduction traction motors.  It has to be remembered that in 1936, the diesel-electric locomotive was a new breed entirely to 99% of the engineers and the technique for handling them correctly was quite different from handling a steam locomotive.  Engineer Weissbarth, with whom we'd worked during the 1934 tests and was supposedly 75 then, was still working in 1936 and he was becoming a bit forgetful sometimes.  One of his favorite practices was to let the locomotive stand with the brakes set and the throttle open, something which an electric-drive locomotive of any kind is not prepared to take for very long without damage.  So there was an educational job to be done also.  We had a few headlight bulb failures and sent some of the failed bulbs back to NELA Park for examination.  This may have been caused by excessive engine governor hunting resulting in very high lighting circuit voltages occasionally.  For the diesel engines had had a few troubles also but nothing serious.  They finally installed larger oil pumps on both I-R and C-B units.  And there was some fiddling with location of certain control devices on the engines.  All in all, however, the engine record was quite good during the break-in period.

By all odds, our greatest headache proved to be the CP38 air compressor.  The motor driving the compressor, although a dual-commutator, twin-armature design to operate entirely off the main generator, gave little or no trouble, ^[[but]] the compressor portion itself was in deep trouble almost from the beginning.  It was a perfect example of how only actual service experience can be relied on to prove out a design--no amount of factory testing