History
The Virginian electrified a section of its line through the Appalachian mountains in the mid-1920s with a 11,000 volt, 25 Hz AC system. The electrification was widely regarded as a success, but probably because of its huge cost, the Virginian never extended this electrification.
The Virginian originally used a fleet of three-unit boxcab locomotives designated EL-3A. These were supplemented in 1946 by two pairs of two-unit streamlined locomotives designated as EL-2B. By the 1950s, the EL-3A fleet was becoming life-expired, and Virginian went to GE for new locomotives as replacements. The locomotives were delivered to the Virginian between October 1956 and January 1957 and numbered 130-141. GE used then-new Ignitron rectifier technology, first used on the experimental Pennsylvania Railroad E2c and E3b locomotives. Although this same technology was used with less-than-optimal success on the earlier EP-5 locomotives built for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, it worked flawlessly on the Virginian’s EL-Cs due to the much larger area available in the EL-C (which lacked the steam generator/fuel tank and weight restrictions necessitated in the EP-5).
In December 1959, the Virginian Railway merged with the Norfolk and Western Railway. The N&W renumbered the locomotives 230-241. Only one of the locomotives was repainted, it being No. 235, which required it, after an accident. The N&W only routed eastbound traffic over the former Virginian, with all westbound traffic going over the N&W’s original route. The electrification system became surplus to requirements and was shut down in June 1962. Locomotive #230 was rebuilt as a road slug the next month and renumbered 180. All of the locomotives were sold to the New Haven which classified them as EF-4, and renumbered them 300-310 (N&W #180 was used as a parts source for the others). In 1969, new owner Penn Central reclassed them as E33 and renumbered the 300 and 302-310 as 4601-4610 (New Haven #301 was damaged in an accident and scrapped). Retained and repainted by Conrail, all 10 E33s were retired at the end of March 1981 when Conrail shut down its electric freight operations.
Read more about this topic: VGN EL-C
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)