I haven't seen any posts on this, so I thought I throw this out there. I got mine last week (in the Milwaukee Road fantasy scheme) and I'm impressed with it so far. I got to run it at a club NTRAK event over the weekend on both DC and DCC. On DC, it would occasionally lose power and stop, but after a second or 2 it would start back up again as if nothing happened. Annoying, but not unexpected. It appears the "keep alive" only works on DCC, because on DCC it ran flawlessly. As an electric, the sound was not very noticable , but the horn and bell had really good sound. Paint and details were all first rate. It picks up power thru all wheels including the forward and trailing trucks. On the 6 drive wheels, the forward set have traction tires, and the middle set are blind drivers. It had no problem negotiating the curves on our mountain line which are slightly under 9.75 radius. What really impressed me was the pulling power. I was running my WW2 military train, which is mostly 50 ft flatcars with loads of 2 tanks, trucks, ect. It's 57 cars long with the caboose. I normally pull it with an ABBA set of FTs but after a couple of hours I wanted to give them a rest, and I just thought "what the heck". I pulled the FTs and hooked up the P5. It takes a bit of juice on DC to get the sound on and the loco moving, but at a little over half throttle, the sound came on and about a second later, the loco slowly pulled away with all 57 cars........no wheel slip......I was VERY impressed. This loco is about the size of a 50 ft boxcar, although it is quite heavy and it looked a bit ridiculous with that many cars behind it, but it definitely pulls.
Cool! I'm thinking of buying one for the unique factor. I'll admit, it probably won't get too many laps on the layout, but it's nice to know that it runs.
It wouldn't surprise me if a single prototype P5a could handle a train of that size, though I expect the Pennsy would have gone with a double header.
It would certainly surprise me. Yes, they had horsepower. But they put it to the rail through only three powered axles. They barely beat the tractive effort of a mogul.
The P5a is what led Pennsy to design the GG-1, which actually was a pair of P5a's articulated back-to-back.
Well, almost. It didn't have twice as many idler axles as the P5a, nor twice as much horsepower. It did steal styling from the P5s. I always thought that was Pennsy propaganda to deflect from the fact that it was a copy of the New Haven EP-3.
We run with two P5a's a few weekends ago, the sound of these little machines is great.. Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-T510 met Tapatalk
You're right, of course. However, I was using ACPTULSA's reference to a Mogul, Pennsy's G Class. Hence, a GG-1 was two Moguls back-to-back.
So are you, except G denoted ten wheelers, not moguls. Moguls were F types. These ex-GN motors were FF2s. That was definitely how their nomenclature worked. And if I remember correctly, the P5a/P5s was as close as they ever got to a Hudson. Likewise their R1 (actually the first to wear the Loewy styling the GG1 made famous), a 2-D-2, was the closest they ever got to a Northern. No doubt they'd have liked the Hudson type better if their archival the NYC hadn't invented it. They fancied themselves "the railroad university", but never had a Hudson or a Northern (two excellent types of steamers), apparently because they were prejudiced against damned New Yorkers. That's no school I'd care to attend. I never did figure out why their first and only 2-C-2 locomotive was the P5, not the P1. I also find it odd the T1 wasn't called the DD3, like their 2-B+B-2s DD1 and DD2. Which would have made the Q1 a GO1 and the Q2 an OG1. Maybe it was because the T1 wasn't articulated. In which case it should have been the R2. L type Mikados shared their letter with the L5, so the cylinder count and short shafts shouldn't have mattered. But I guess the publicity department named the T1, not the mechanical department.
This morning I was looking at my Pennsy Power books by Alvin Staufer, trying to gather a handful of specifications for the P5s, but I then recalled that this sort of thing gets out of hand with Starting Tractive Effort, Continuous Tractive Effort, HP, Weight On Drivers, passenger vs freight gearing and more. Thanks for the fine images @acptulsa . The P Co. was a magnificent enterprise in so many dimensions.
