EMD throttle

I just showed this to my wife, and she said, "NO, you are NOT buying that for your layout!"

All this talk of running trains with an i phone...... nonsense, THATS more like it!

I have one of those control stands out of an SD24, same style with the old transition lever. Used it to run HO trains many years ago. I tapped home-made rheostat windings in to the dynamic brake control contacts. The A-B-C-D circuitry didn't lend itself to easy control with an ordinary rheostat setup because the ohm ratings for the eight throttle notches have to be non-linear for model train control. Later I moved on to simple and effective walkaround solid state controls for HO and N using 317 voltage regulators. 

The serial number on this Ebay item looks like 70M-61. Made in year 1970. EMD used letters A through M (skipping "I") to indicate month of manufacture on many parts, and 61 is the number for that month.

Sometime in the 1970's these control stands were redesigned to eliminate the transition lever and provide a separate handle for dynamic brake, which had an oval handle shape oriented 90° off from that of the throttle handle. I heard a railroader story that there was a wreck where an unauthorized person was operating a train while the engineer dozed off, and he thought he had put the train in dynamic brake for a long downgrade but it was actually still in power. Then when he pulled back on the throttle handle (which used to double for dynamic brake after moving the transition lever), the train speeded up instead of slowing down, and wrecked. Supposedly that was a reason for the redesign.

There's still some of this style in operation. Several of the EJ&E SD38's have them and I think some of the WC GP40's do as well.

CN_Hogger

 Some non-re bodied NS GP-38's also still use this style of controls.

Collin,

You will find some ex-Southern units still around with the same type of throttle. They are odd in that they have horns on each end of the unit and the horn will normally blow on the end in the direction the reverser is set. That is except when running short hood forward, if you ratchet out of power and blow the horn before ratcheting into DB the horn will instead blow on the long hood end. Once you ratchet back into DB it will again start blowing on the short hood end.

Mike,

I think the reason that the ex-Sou. units do that is because they were set up with the long hood as the Front of the unit.

I would imagine that the FEC units are short hood as Front. It could be that in their case that the short hood horn will blow when running long hood forward and between modes. I just don't know.

Do they have some sort of magnet valves in the reverser circuit? Maybe Hot Water could shed light?

I think it does since the horn is electrically operated. Many times you can hear the thing "knock" when the horn is activated.

Jim I use to mess around with new conductors coming out of power and blowing the horn towards the long hood end 

 A lot of those engines had metal reverser handles.

UP's DD40 units (6900's) had their horns trainlined for a time, so all DD40's in one consist would blow togther. Someone thought it would be clever to use some of those extra MU connections for this. One time there was a failure report on a DD40 consist: "blow horn and all units die". The wires got crossed somewhere.