Viewing page 88 of 99

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

29
some at Erie. In fact, this had been the big godsend to us during the deepest days of the Depression and without it, we would have been in almost unbelievably desperate trouble. So the Pennsy program and all the people connected with it were a sort of elite thing around the place for some time and the subject of envy here and there. As this account shows, I'd been generally busy most of the time and had had little cause to complain on that score but in spite of this, I'm sure that occasionally I'd cast a wistful eye in the direction of the Pennsy project and particularly its great GG1 locomotive program. So when I was assigned to the New Haven 0361-0366 order, I was elated. At the same time, I realized that I had a great deal to learn about AC locomotive design, application and operation. I had spent several months in AC Engineering in Schenectady in 1925 on synchronous motor design which had been a great refresher for me on AC theory but had extremely little in common with AC traction-motor design, which was based on series motors of the commutator type. Fortunately I didn't have to design the motors but it was desirable that I understand them reasonably well. And not only was it an AC job but also the largest and most powerful locomotive by far that I'd handled. And to top things off, I would be dealing with a group from the New Haven who were really expert on AC work and AC design from their long experience with it on their electrification. On the diesel work, I probably had more experience than the New Haven bunch I was dealing with but on this new job, the tables were suddenly turned and very decisively. So this intensified the challenging aspect of my job. For it was pretty much a whole new ball game for me as far as the locomotive design was concerned, both electrically and to some extent mechanically. On the electrical side, to begin with there was the awesome 11,000-volts, both on the roof and in the cab until it reached the main transformer via an oil circuit breaker. I was very aware of this feature and respected it completely. There was this big main transformer for stepping the 11,000-volt trolley power down to about 600-volts for the traction-motor circuits. The transformer was filled with Pyranol, a synthetic cooling liquid which was pumped through radiators outside the transformer case, and these radiators were force-cooled from the main ventilating duct. The traction motor control was accomplished by connecting the motors to various taps on the main transformer through a set of three big reactors commonly known as "pigs" which allowed ranging up and down the voltage scale without short-circuiting any portion of the new transformer secondary in the process. This was all new to me except in the vaguest terms. And I got quite a thrill out of becoming acquainted with this system. Also to someone who'd been brought up on DC locomotive control with its limited number of running points, the ability to run continuously on any of the 19 controller points seemed like a wonderful drem [[sic]] come true.