[PRCo] Re: 4393 Versus 4366

[Herb Brannon]

That's all well and good, however, should fall under the subject of Control
Systems.
I want to know where 4393 and 4366 were assigned during their tenure at
PRCo. I know where they were on January 1, 1952. Where were they after that?



On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 18:03, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>wrote:

> Funny thing, Herb.
> Normally cars were segregated to barns in Pittsburgh by equipment.   We
> all knew which barns had GE PCCs and which had Westinghouse PCCs.
>
> The yellow cars had a similar scheme.   There were barns that had cars
> with K-35 or K-43 controls.   Then there were other barns that had cars
> with HL control.   Same as with the PCCs, the idea was to minimize parts
> inventory.   And, just like the PCC assignments, Homewood was totally mixed
> because it was right next door to the central parts room so it didn't
> matter.
>
> What is HL?   For those unfamiliar, HL was a Westinghouse remote control
> system, meaning the motorman's controller did not physically handle the 600
> volt motoring circuits, it instead told a separate controller, usually
> mounted in a case under the car, what to do.   Westinghouse used low
> voltage lines between the platform controller and the motoring controllers.
>  In HL or AL, the L stood for Line voltage passed through a dropping
> resistor to get a low voltage control circuit.  In AB or HB, a battery was
> used for the control circuit.   The H stood for hand notching, a A for
> automatic progression.   Got it?   OK, now most Westinghouse schemes used
> pneumatic switches to control the actual 600 volt (or 1200 volt) circuits,
> and they we be mounted so that if you lost air, they would naturally open
> by gravity.
>
> General Electric favored solenoid (magnetic) switches instead of air
> (pneumatic switches). Almost all of the Westinghouse HL installations in
> Pittsburgh were really knock-offs of GE type M control ... they were low
> voltage (instead high voltage with GE favored) but they used solenoid
> switches instead of pneumatics.  The only possible exception (and I have
> never been able to prove this one way or the other), those 6000 series late
> 1920s experimental cars might have been pneumatic.
>
> OK, which barns ... Keating was supposedly a drum control barn.   All of
> the single-end cars there in my memory were 4700s or 5500s in later years.
>    I made a stupid assumption that 4366 was therefore a K35 car.  Ooops.
> I found a picture of it at 12 Evergreen and guess what?   I can see very
> clearly, the HL contactor box under the far end of the car.    What the
> blanket-blank caused them to mix cars at Keating unless it was the only car
> they had available to put there?  In the period up until 1951-52 when route
> 9 also worked out of Keating, it used a 4200 and all those low 4200s that
> were still active very late were HL cars also.  Roster pdf file attached.
>  This roster also confirms that 4366 was a HL car; 4393 was a K-35 car.
>
> Might be when we got to the very bitter end, it didn't matter.   If it
> worked, put it there.
>
>
>
> -- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
> -- Type: application/pdf
> -- Size: 184k (188994 bytes)
> -- URL : http://lists.dementix.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/roster.pdf
>
>
> -- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
> -- Type: text/plain
> -- Size: 2k (2269 bytes)
> -- URL : http://lists.dementix.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/ecartIFqFm8
>
>
>
>


-- 
Herb Brannon
In Cuyahoga Valley National Park