Rolly Martin Country: E8 locomotive

01 July 2020

GM EMD E7 Operating Manual, Part 3

Steam generator operation, electrical equipment, troubleshooting and truck removal are covered in this third and final installment of the E7 operating manual. The veteran hoggers and firemen must have been thrilled to have to learn how to 'make steam' all over again - using the complex steam generators.

The other two sections of this manual can be found in the index Railway Technology & Systems 04 (button above). This and other manuals can be found under the heading Diesels, The First Generation.

The loose-leaf binder holding this 70 year old manual would not open, so I used the expedient of scanning a two-page spread for most images.

The diagram above is shown at what you could call GoogleMax (the maximum image display size after it is uploaded to Google).

To make it possible to read the details, the diagram is split and presented in two halves below.

Look for the overlap - which duplicates the 'fuel pumps' location at centre/bottom (above).

End of manual.

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In the first part of this series, I explained the unlikely

north shore of Lake Superior provenance of my particular E7 manual.

E7 locomotives were not purchased by Canadian railways.

Here are the sales figures for some of the EMD E-units.

The Second Diesel Spotter's Guide; Jerry A Pinkepank; 1980; Kalmbach.

* * *

Early Trains magazines were surprisingly non-specific when it came to nailing down the builders' models of diesel locomotives in articles and photo captions ... at least by today's standards. An E7 was used on the GM Train of Tomorrow. The latter has an excellent, detailed article on Wikipedia.

from: Trains magazine; July 1947; Kalmbach.

* * *

My father attended (he won it through a Montreal Star competition) a teacher's summer course and travelled to Syracuse University in July 1961. The course was on the use of newspapers as teaching aids in the classroom. He travelled to Syracuse, New York by bus because we didn't own a car and also because the bus got him there conveniently.

My father 'happened' to visit the Syracuse station and took this slide of the DeWitt Clinton (a named train) westbound. An E8 leads and perhaps there is an E7 trailing. With 4000 horsepower for what looks like mainly mail and express, they probably got over the road quite efficiently.

09 June 2020

GM EMD E7 Operating Manual, Part 2

This post includes sections on locomotive operation, cooling system, lubricating oil system and the fuel oil system. It concludes with a couple of contemporary photos of the E7 in operation - including a B unit.

Many of the locomotive engineers reading this manual might only have experience with steam locomotive operation. So the technical writers of this manual carefully and clearly explain procedures and principles. It may be my imagination, but it seems that this reference is written more in good, clear English than in technical jargon.

During the steam era, courses in railway technology and theory were published - most notably by the International Textbook Company of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And appliances, such as feedwater heaters, injectors and mechanical stokers had their own manufacturers' operating manuals. In contrast, diesel locomotives seem to have been the first type of motive power with complete operating manuals written by the manufacturer and specific to a particular model.

When an experienced steam locomotive engineer was first introduced to a diesel-electric and its simpler labelled controls, accounts sometimes stated that the engineer could be successfully operating the unit after only one training session over the road.

... However, 'driving' a new unit with simpler controls was distinct from being able to trouble-shoot it if it failed on the road ... or knowing that it couldn't be operated through water above the couplers - as sometimes occurred with steam engines!