[PRCo] Re: Nachod Signals

[Edward H. Lybarger]

I didn't misunderstand; I merely didn't confine the description to the
traffic lights in Italy.  I know your reference!

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of Fred
Schneider
Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 1:37 PM
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
Subject: [PRCo] Re: Nachod Signals


You've misunderstood me, Ed.   In southern Italy, traffic lights are
mere chromatic ornaments at intersections.   But it's spreading to
eastern Pennsylvania.

In all seriousness, the Nachods worked reasonably well in normal
street service because the operators (owners)  didn't try to mix
wheels and shoes of differing widths.   They also didn't confuse
their operators with a dozen different brake valves and ten different
types of controllers like museums do.

Figure that a motorman working out of Keating had in 1950 had either
an air-electric PCC or an all-electric PCC and, for all practical
purposes, he probably didn't care whether it was a GE 1100 or a GE
1600, or he had a 1700 all-electric, or he had a 5500 with K-35
control and a self-lapping brake valve.  A senior man would have had
the double-end slow-speed cars that worked routes 9 or 12 and the
average bear would have never touched one.

If you worked out of Ingram, the drill would have been the same
except that the high speed cars would have had HL instead of K
control.   Therefore the emergency brake procedure, if you lost air,
would have been different.   But you would not have had to think,
where am I an what car do I have if I lost an air compressor.   You
would have been running the same car for months or perhaps years and
it would have been instinctive.

And if you worked for Muni in the old days at Geneva, you would have
had an Iron Monster with HL control.  Period.   Am I right Jim.
Until they started mixing in the Bandits with Cineston controllers
and then the PCCs.

The only people who got real variety were those men qualified to run
work cars and they got the old stuff that street revenue men hadn't
run in years.    They were often the only people left who knew how to
run with hand brakes.

On Jan 1, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Edward H. Lybarger wrote:

> At PTM, Nachod signals are considered chromatic ornamentations, as
> Fred
> likes to call colored lights.  They are extremely unreliable, just
> as the
> were in the latter days of operation on 38A, for example.  The
> contactors
> are very touchy...they prefer current collection devices of a constant
> width, so when mix our standard wheels with a handful of shoes (as
> on two of
> the Red Arrow cars) we get inconsistent chromatic renderings.  As
> I've said
> before, this is why we dispatch by radio, not lights.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of Bob
> Dietrich
> Sent: Monday, January 01, 2007 12:07 PM
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo] Nachod Signals
>
>
> I remember not too long ago a discussion of signaling on this list;
> at least
> I think it was this list.  Anyway, the current issue of Trolley Talk -
> #283,September-October 2006 - has a very good explanation of the
> Nachod
> system with references to a couple other systems as well.  If you
> are like
> me, ignorant of such topics, this is an informative article.
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>
>
>