How the SD50 Became The Blunder That Destroyed EMD’s Reputation| Garbage on The Rails Episode 8

Read the book "On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors". It will really show you how much and how long GM has been messed up. One of the company's famous quotes was "GM is no longer in business to make products, we are in business to make money"

I’ve been an engineer for 17 years with BNSF in the Midwest. I run a lot of modern GE and EMD motors and I can tell you that the most reliable motors we have are the emd sd70 Macs. I’ve never seen one break down. If I’ve got problems it’s always a GE dash 9 or newer.

There's a reason why GEs are called toasters, and it may or may not have to do with the parent company making toasters!

Imagine, my fictional variant of the SD50: The SD50ER, with the ER standing for ENGINE REPLACED.

Funny story: I bought an Athearn HO Scale GP50 in the 1990's. It ran well except the motor kept shorting out against the frame, the wheel sets kept getting out of alignment, and were hard to keep clean. - ironic that the problems of the SD50 transferred over to model railroading lol!

I watched this again and remembered when John Carrier and I stopped at Clifton Forge VA CSX shops likely around 1984 very late at night. A shop employee happened to spot us and took us on a tour of their engine rebuild shop. It was fantastic to us being engineering students at WV Tech and rail fans! It was very well lit and organized locomotive heavy maintenance and refinish facility. At 10p or later it was just us and our tour guide looking around this huge inside facility!   I asked our tour guide what he thought of the new SD50s and he said they don't know them very well because they have extended maintenance intervals of 3 months. In that regard they didn't like the SD50s because their required maintenance was so little compared to the other locomotives. At that time the SD50 had not developed the issue as it did later. They hadn't had an SD50 at that time in for serious problems and this is on the CSX mainline through VA and WV along the New River Gorge that GE U23s would always appear to shutdown to become dead weight being pulled up the grade by EMDs. We got a tour of the locomotive paint shop with an immaculate inside and out refinished and rebuild GP30! It had just had its interior refinished in a perfect glossy gray likely poly urethane paint. It looked like a concourse car paint job. The GP30 had a build plate of sometime in the early 1960s. It looked so fresh from its refinish it actually glowed in the paint shop lights! I'd never seen such a flawless paint job on a locomotive. Every ding had been removed and every less than perfect surface had been made perfect. The CSX Clifton Forge VA locomotive paint shop had made that GP30 look better than EMD did for its own marketing photos.

It should come as no surprise the GM also screwed up their locomotive division during these days. They screwed up everything else they did.

The biggest issue is the electrical system. I believe the 645 E3 could in fact put out more horsepower with some significant modifications. The crankshaft failures are because of failure to maintain proper alignment of the generator to the engine. This is a subject that I have extensive experience with having aligned fifty or more main generators. Factory trained at Motive Power Wabtec in Boise Idaho. I helped build MP36-3 and NP40-3 locomotives.

Trains magazine also stated that the group of engineers that developed the SD40/45. Were going into retirement and a new group of engineers were to make improvements to the line of locomotive. They undid a lot of small things that the past engineers did example : they removed some flexibility in the lines. They put in loop for expansion and put straight piping to save moneys. There is no cost in going 50 RPM higher and no R&D cost in testing the effect of the change. I subscribe “ Trains Magazine “ from the 70s and get most of my information from them. I did occasionally go to the train yards and talk to some of the the personnel that I come across on the visits there.

GE's customer service is so good, they include free cardboard to shim up your instrument cluster when it starts to rattle loose.

Another place where EMD cleaned up was in tug boats and Great Lakes cargo freighters. Nearly every freighter built by Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, WI from the early 1970's to now has had 20-645-E7's or a 710 model. The 1000' long by 105' wide "super lakers" have 4 645-E7's coupled in pairs to reduction gears to one of two propellers. Most of the other vessels built have a pair coupled to a reduction gear to a single screw. Only US Steel built a 1000' vessel at Bay shipbuilding with a different engine model (two Enterprise diesel engines) and while more powerful she's had more engine issues. 3 ships on the lakes have two 16-251 Alcos, one ships was repowered from steam to a GEVO (now scrapped) and 1 tugboat (loudest thing on Earth) has two second hand GE FDL's that came out of an old SOO U boat or early -7. Look up Olive L. Moore makes a U turn to hear how loud that thing is. On the US side there are a few Cats/MaK models, a few Colt-Pielstiks (French engine), and Rolls-Royce Bergen's but EMD has the lions share. Great engines, I think when you look at how EMD's linger on even in Class 1's and dominated short lines it proves the longevity of EMD design.

(Retired NS electrician here). A couple of points, if I may. The 50 was the first engine to employ the "super series" traction control system. Very complicated but very effective and still in use today on the ac models. The problem from an electrician's point of view is we had a computerized control system with no screen. No fault log, no real time data. Instead, there were over 100 test points. Real fun with an intermittent problem. The other thing is I don't understand the praise for the ge dash 7. Total junk and a little dangerous to work on.

Not all of the SD50’s featured in this video were built in the US. Utah Railway 6062 featured (16:09) was an Australian built example, being built by Clyde Engineering (Australia’s EMD license holder) in 1982. It was one of 5 built at Clyde’s Rosewater (Adelaide) plant for use by Hamersley Iron hauling iron ore through the Pilbara region. They remained in Australia until 1995 when they were withdrawn from Hamersley Iron service and sent to the US.

The entire 50 series was overall a not well designed. EMD was trying to get way too much from the 645 16 cylinders engines. They had major oil return problems were instead of using a steel return line they used a copper line with flare fittings. Then they had major electrical problems also. The roads that made them work knew what the issues were and made the fixes needed to correct them.

Thank you for explaining the engineering behind some of America's most infamous locomotives, as I've always wondered what exactly led to their infamy.

I handled one of the first batches to come to Seaboard System on the former Clinchfield in 1983. My first thought was "WOW"! They had plenty of power without wheel slippage (the radar system worked great) and a dynamic braking system that would stand a train on it's head. But as time and usage wore on, the quality issues quickly came to light. The dynamic brakes started to fail enroute and prime mover failures started happening too frequently, leaving many unit coal trains dead in the water. They were great locomotives when they worked, and when CSX got the A-frames rebuilt under warranty from EMD, they performed reliably. I would like to mention that the last batches of our CRR/Family Lines' SD40-2's that came out of LaGrange suffered from many of the same problems, especially dynamic brake overcurrent protection regulators. I think it was just the profit pressure coming from GM that led to the product quality issues of that day. And you are correct, it spelled the beginning of the end for EMD. Frankly, I think the GP38 and GP38-2's were the finest products to ever come out of LaGrange, and I handled many of them, from the first batch of original Clinchfield GP38's to the Family Lines GP38-2's. On the CRR, they handled heavy trains far beyond their tonnage ratings without fail. We abused them, and they kept going. Aside from the battery box explosions, they were EMD's finest.

Same problem with the 4400 horsepower dash 9's. Ever wonder why they had so many catastrophic turbo failures? Because the motor was only ment to put out 4,000 horsepower but GE had them set up to run quicker to put out 400 more horsepower. It was too much stress on them. GE is a lot cheaper to buy than EMD, but there HELLA less reliable. RBMN's grey and green SD50's are ex UP and are SD50M's. They still retain 3600 horsepower, and for the most part they seem to work fine.

As a computer programmer, I had this posted on my wall for all asking for changes to see. Never had a major time issue: A Good Quick job, won’t be Cheap. A Good job Cheap, won’t be Quick. A Cheap job Quick, won’t be Good.

GE engines don't go into "runaway" mode because oil leaks into the exhaust system and catches fire. They go into "runaway" because of a failure of the turbocharger bearing seal which allows the hundreds of gallons of engine oil in the crankcase to siphon into the combustion system unregulated by cylinder injectors...the result being the massive fires out of the exhaust stack and ultimate destruction of the engine when it uses up all of its lubricating oil while operating at twice the designed rpm it was intended to operate at.

I was on the inside of the manufacturing of the first SD50s while working for UP. I found an almost unworkable situation in LeGrange between the electrical engineers, the floor workers assembling the units and labor management. It was as if no one could agree on anything and the workers were hating everyone. Soon after the entire EMD facility was shut down and manufacturing was moved to Canada where labor union waters were more friendly.