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The locomotives also had to operate in the 660-volt third-rail territory of the New York Central to gain access to Grand Central Terminal so that this introduced additional complication but I was thoroughly familiar with DC control from my apprenticeship with Lew Webb so this presented no problem to me. Mechanically, the driving trucks presented a whole new bag of tricks because the traction motors were twin-armature machines and truck-mounted rather than axle-hung. A quill through which passed the locomotive axle, rotated in bearings in the twin-motor frame and was driven by a pinion on each armature, in turn driving the axle with a twin-cup arrangement mounted on a spider. It was a very crude-looking drive but it had been in service for many years and very successfully. I failed to say that the twin spring-cups pressed on pads on the spokes of the driving wheels. So this will give some idea of the magnificent animal I was now associated with and it was a magnificent piece of machinery any way you looked at it in the years 1937 and 1938 before moon-rockets and 747s. Moreover, I didn't know it at the time, but Bob Walsh, who handled the job in Locomotive Engineering, was to become ill in 1938 about the time we were getting the locomotives into service and finally had to give up his job temporarily with the result that I took over Bob's duties in working out some fixes for troubles we ran into, particularly in the ventilation system.

I presume the next most logical step here is to introduce the New Haven men with whom we worked on this job, some old friends and some new. I believe that Phil Hatch was working exclusively on the diesels at the time and wasn't on this job. His place was taken by Jim Bracken, Mechanical Engineer of Van Nest Shop, and also pretty knowledgeable on the electrical end. Although Jim was a rather fussy, 40ish bachelor and a stickler for everything being exactly just so, I liked him. I think he was a worrier too, which may have accounted for his fussiness. Actually, he had already eating at his vitals, a cancer which was to finish him the following year but he was wholly unaware of it--in fact, some said he never did realize just what was wrong with him. He was a tragic figure as the job progressed and it became evident that something very bad was afflicting him. But he never let it interfere with his devotion to the job and he came to Erie regularly for all of our many meetings. He was a pleasant guy. I've never seen him really display anger. But he would argue endlessly in his thoughtful, pleasant way, very serious, very patient, and more often than not he'd win his point. Jim was a big, tall, handsome, youngish-looking man with curly, black hair who'd never married and lived with his old mother--perhaps she was the reason he'd not married; he was that kind of a guy. And that fall of 1937 as we all toiled to whip together a good design for 0361-0366, Jim was in the early stages of dying but didn't suspect it. And when he died the following year, we were all grief-stricken. He was a good guy.

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