Last weekend the city of Galesburg, IL celebrated their annual Railroad Days festival. BNSF has the 2nd largest classification yard on their network here & as in the prior years, had a GE locomotive on display. The last 5 years they had ES44C4 on display but this year they had a brand new Tier-IV compliant ET44C4 on display. The public were allowed to climb on designated portions of the locomotive & there were GE & BNSF employees in the cab to answer any questions & were also willing to vacate their seats so that the public could pose in the engineer’s or conductor’s chair.
I spent over 30 minutes with these employees who also accompanied me outside the cab & on the ground to help me identify some new parts on this model.
So here are the changes. The ET44C4 is 16” longer than the ES44AC / ES40DC / ES44C4. We tried to identify where that extra length was since the front & rear portions of the locomotive seemed similar to the ES44C4 from prior years. The fuel tank also looked similar to the fuel tank on the ES44C4 but there is this trapezoidal tank between the fuel tank & the rear truck. We tried to identify the purpose of this tank by looking at some openings in the frame of the locomotive behind the engine & from some pipes around it & to the employee’s best guess, it was some sort of retention tank for any fluids that might puddle in the engine cab.
The was only 1 alternator on the ET44C4 compared to 2 on the ES44C4. On the ES44C4 there was the main alternator that provided the traction needs & there was a second alternator to drive the fans / blowers or some other accessories. The ET44C4 had just 1 alternator & a massive bank of invertors directly behind the operator’s cab which the employee felt might also where some of the extra length went.
As seen in all the prior photos, the radiator section at the rear looked different & long. The ET44C4 has 2 radiator fans. Around 40% of the output of 1 of these fans is something that the air-to-air heat-exchanger on the ES44C4 did. As a result, the ET44C4 does not have the split radiator shape we had seen on the ES44AC / ES40DC / ES44C4.
Finally, here is a photo of my daughter & me, taken sitting in the engineer’s seat & another picture of my family that fellow OGR member, Mike DeBerg took. Thanks Mike.
These are just my opinion,
Thanks,
Naveen Rajan