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52 can begin to equal the real service conditions. It was a high-speed, water-cooled machine and completely different from anything we'd ever built before. We had excessive heating of the discharge pipe, excessive lube oil consumption, scored cylinders, broken valves, scored pistons, extreme noise and perhaps worst of all, inadequate capacity. If there was anything approaching continuous operation such as pumping up a long train or operating a long time because of an open angle cock, the exhaust pipe would get so hot that it would melt the soldered pipe joints. There was a great hue and cry on the part of the engineers about the lack of capacity, particularly when pumping up passenger trains. It was claimed it usually took 1 1/2 minutes per car which was excessive and resulted in train delays. So, one night Harry Craig and I rode 0907 on the passenger switching assignment at New Haven to get some actual statistics on this. We rode from midnight to 6 a.m. but unfortunately there had been a wreck on the Pennsylvania that night which upset the schedules badly and there wasn't any heavy work! However, there was one incident that proved amusing even to Phil Hatch in spite of all the troubles we were having. Phil reported one morning that he had a complaint that the compressor had [[underlined]] too much [[/underlined]] capacity! In Boston, they were pushing a train of 40 cars of coal down a siding and got so enthused about it that they pushed two cars off the end of the siding. The brakeman claimed that he'd opened the angle cock to stop the train but the compressor had so much capacity, he couldn't get the brakes to apply! Things got progressively worse and I find Archie Currie and I were in Boston the latter part of November trying desperately to come up with an answer. 0902 was out of service with two scored cylinders and a broken valve. She was in New Haven while in Boston 0909 was out with scored liners and pistons. We arranged to have a complete spare compressor shipped from Erie to New Haven and new liners and pistons shipped to Boston, all shipments by [[underlined]] express. [[/underlined]] This was a costly way to have to do it but when locomotives were out of service, no expense was ever spared to get them back to work as soon as possible. This was a long-standing ethic of our business. I can remember even yet old Archie Currie and I racking our brains over this problem and searching for some solution regardless of cost. We considered replacing these horrible headaches with a conservative, slow-speed design but the problem was that there wasn't room in the locomotive to install such a thing. We had developed a theory that it was the unequal expansion of pistons and cylinders when the cooling water was cold that cause the trouble. We had noted that day in the enginehouse with steam connected to the locomotive for some time, the water temperature was only 96°F. At New Haven, working outdoors with no steam or even with it, it would be even worse. We went on down to New Haven to confer with Phil Hatch and arranged to have
