[PRCo] Re: PCC development

[Fred Schneider]

Of course that was the track that General Electric was on at that  
time.  They had developed pneumatic cam controllers back in the teens  
as a way to synchronize automatic advance equipment without the need  
for relay interlocks.  It was apparently a lot less complicated than  
the type M form A apparatus that they had been building.   If I  
recall correctly, the first PC control was used on the Steinway  
tunnel cars for New York city.   This was later advanced to PCM  
control which made four upward and backward sweeps to get up to 18  
points.   So by the time GE began to produce the 17KM3 units, they  
already had two decades of experience building compressed air over  
oil engines to drive cams.   In this case all they did was use the  
same fundamental mechanism to drive a brush arm around a commutator.   
Even though they went to all-electric units for PCC cars in 1940,  
they didn't stop producing PC or PCM controls.   Someone at Erie told  
me, when I was doing the PCC books, that they had just produced an  
order of PC control apparatus for Africa.   That would have been  
about 1978.

On Oct 22, 2005, at 11:25 AM, Boris Cefer wrote:

> It looks that the early GE series did not differ from each other.  
> At least
> 1000s and 1100s. But the el-air-oil powered commutator controller  
> was crazy
> enough!
>
> B
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
> Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 5:20 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: PCC development
>
>
>
>> Plus the General Electric variants.,
>> On Oct 22, 2005, at 10:49 AM, Boris Cefer wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I am just trying to spend some time in PCC electrical drawings.
>>> With the recent PTM roster update, one might be curious what the
>>> actual connections (except the recently added b-u controller) in
>>> the 1138 are.
>>> At the beginning, there were three (3) electrically different
>>> groups of PCCs:
>>>
>>> a) 100, 1000-1074 except 1054
>>> b) 1100-1154 and 1054
>>> c) 1155-1174
>>>
>>> The drawings and other stuff that I collected also here (dating
>>> from 1939) indicates more changes within 1939 than we can imagine.
>>> There is no drawing for the series 1100-1154 and 1054, which would
>>> include also the 1138, but there were obviously extensive
>>> improvements.
>>>
>>> This does not reuire any response, just an attempt to put some
>>> light on the subject.
>>>
>>> B
>>>
>
>
>