Even MORE General Electric brochure photos

Yet another round of GE sales brochure photos. Hopefully this will help occupy our many snowed-in friends in the Eastern half of the US.

Let's lead off with another view of the locomotive that heads this blog, namely the experimental General Electric road locomotive no. GE 750.

General Electric 750. Four unit experimental road locomotive, built in 1955. Length overall 212 feet, weight in working order total 490 tons- all on drivers. Rated 6000 horsepower. Operations totaled over a million unit miles under testing, mainly on the Erie Railroad (for which the locomotive was painted.) Two units contained Cooper-Bessemer FVBL-8T engines rated 1200 HP for traction; two units contained Cooper-Bessemer FVBL-12T engines rated 1800 HP for traction.

Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific No. 206, General Electric model U25B.







Assembly of FDL-16A diesel engines. General Electric decided immediately upon separating from the old ALCO-GE agreements to develop the Cooper-Bessemer F series engine for locomotive service, namely in 1953. In 1954-1955 GE built a diesel engine lab at Erie, and in 1958 took design and development responsibility for the FDL diesel series from Cooper-Bessemer, who still built the engines for GE at its Mount Vernon, Ohio plant until early 1963 when assembly was transferred to Erie, Pennsylvania at GE's plant. In this illustration the nearest engine frame lacks cylinder assemblies; a technician appears to be checking or finishing the bores for pushrods and fuel pumps. The next most distant engine is having its last cylinder assembly installed in the frame by overhead hoist.

Cylinder assembly, seen in cutaway. From sales brochure for U30 locomotives; depicts FDL-16D assembly. Note valve box on top, with valve spring visible; steel cylinder head is visible in center, containing valves and injector nozzle (hidden inside) while removable cylindrical cylinder liner is seen at bottom.








Detail of (circular) cover illustration for U33 sales brochure. Unit closest camera is GE 301, one of the original four U30 test/prototype/demonstrator units that was converted to U33 by the time of this brochure's printing. More interesting is the unit at left, obviously another U33 but numbered "308." There was no GE 308 that we know of; either this number was applied (very well) by an artist for this photo and perhaps the unit was built for, perhaps, NYC or perhaps there was going to be a GE 308 which ended up being one of the two pre-production U33 units built for NYC that were mixed right in with a large order for U30 units. Pure speculation, but this illustration has puzzled me for years.

MUCH more to come!