Penn. RR. GG-1
Penn. RR. GG-1
And of course the other Penn. RR. Electrics....
This is a very beautiful locomotive group -but then they were designed to be. The Web abounds with sites in homage to GG-1's beauty, and it may seem a act of mud slinging vandalism to say -"It Was Lucky..." If you are going to model any american locomotives then those produced by the Penn Railroad are by far the easiest, as the Penn. was almost fanatical about the duplication and quality of its drawings. I have found them very easy to find and use, unlike, (I am ashamed to say) -those of the Midland and LMS...
The GG-1 is in fact just one of a group of electric locomotives that was spawned by the Penn. Railroad. The nose is clincher, if you can get the nose correct for this loco then you have the nose for; R-1, DD-2, P-5A and of course GG-1.
R-1 was a 2-D0-2 and was unique. See Drawing. See Picture
DD-2 was a 2-B0-B0-2 and was unique. See Drawing. See Picture
P-5A was a 2-C0-2 and they made 92 of these. See Drawing. See Picture
GG-1 was a 2-C0-C0-2 -and they made 139 of these...
The reason I have elected to build this icon of Art Deco design is simple. It will be a complete nightmare for me. At the moment I have only rough mathematical models relating to power requirements, cornering, and centre of gravity. The main problems with this locomotive is going to be ones of sheer size. It is going to have to be light enough to lift and rail by one person, yet be strong enough to hold all the chassis work plus the sealed lead acid batteries that will give it life.
If you have read some of my design missives then you will know that I hold articulation very dear to my heart and as I have small radius (for Gauge 3) curves the DD-2 was almost a clear winner. Not only was it articulated but it had a simple 2 axle bogie -thus rendering most of the 3 axle cornering maths redundant. However it still had a VERY large wheelbase that had to be "designed around". I had my provisional plans for a "Klein Lindener" type of chassis for a GG-1 which had a rear steering axle at the ends of the power bogie. It did in the end prove impossible to get a rigid 2 axle system of that spacing around the curves that I was using, but if they were 10 feet -then it would have been easy...
Here is the provisional first draught of one of the power bogies for the GG-1. It does not look at all like the prototype but it will take very sharp corners.
Well a few months have passed by and I have been delving the internet and records depts for a suitable drawing for me to work from. I found one that I liked on the Penn Central library -however it was in a truly terrible condition -so several nights work have been spent "restoring" it using GIMP from GNU. Yes I have a Mac and it runs under the X.11 Libraries. The first few nights were spent with the "rubber" removing all the speckle marks and what looked like a tea cup mark(!). The next process is the try and re-connect the blobs that had been the lines into something that looks like a drawing -I spent quite a lot of time at 800% res and a single pixel pen and rubber... The cleaned up drawing was then loaded into Apple Works and the lines re-drawn and, (as best as possible), the whole drawing brought back to usability. The drawing was then saved as a PNG and then re-loaded back into GIMP for the final rubber work.
This will be the basis of my "working drawing" that I will use to decide what and where things will fit. Feel free to copy any of the above and use them as a basis for your own models. The originals were public domain anyway and if my work can increase the number of GG-1's, (and the other Penn Electrics) -then this is all to the good!!!
