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Erie, Pa.,
Thursday, Sept. 19, '40.

Today had its high spots and its low spots. I'll take the low spots first:

1.) After getting the New York Central put together again as perfectly as we could make it, we ran it and it vibrated as badly as before! We are at a loss to know where the vibration is originating, and Gouldy was in favor of tearing down the whole engine, weighting pistons etc. However, as we were near despair, old Zeke Tinkey got fooling around with Basil Cain and they discovered that by removing one of the rubber pads in the generator support, the vibration largely disappeared. Tonight they are making up blocks to replace the rubber & we'll run again in the morning. Then the question will be - will Bill Hamilton okay it.

2.) Roy Goggin called me about our "interpretation" of the Watertown loco spec. He claimed they put in the request for a curve of tractive effort and speed to protect themselves because of the remarks [[underlined]] I [[/underlined]] made over there that the spec. wasn't rigid enough to assure them getting a big enough engine! This was disturbing. After some thought I reconstructed what happened. They let us [[underlined]] glance [[/underlined]] at the Spec. in April and I saw that the capacity paragraph covered less engine horsepower than we had and said so. I didn't have time to read the whole thing and missed the clause about doing this at the engine horsepower "normally guaranteed by the manufacturer for continuous operation." When I got back to Erie, I read the Picatinny Spec. carefully and caught the point and told Roy the explanation in a phone conversation. Apparently he never passed it on to the Arsenal. My feeling is now that perhaps it is a