Cecil Cityscape wrote:It really began with the PA, with ge and alco getting into a disagreement and breaking their partnership.
To be more specific, the breakup between Alco and GE was in many ways due to the latter's lack of confidence in the way Alco handled their business relationship due to the problems with the 244 series prime movers (i.e. the actual diesel engines) used in its road freight and passenger units from 1946 to 1956, the worst of the bunch being the infernal V-16s in the Alco PA models. While the PAs have tended to be railfan favorites as they were considered to be very sleek, good-looking locomotives, the railroads themselves considered them to be complete lemons, with flexing engine blocks and oil starvation problems that wore out crankshafts on short order, as well as the air-cooled Buchi turbochargers that liked to blow up at inopportune times.
The Southern Pacific probably had the largest Alco fleet in the US (over 600 units purchased) so its experience with Alcos might be of some interest. The S series switchers with the older 539 series prime movers performed reasonably well, but the PAs were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to problems with the 244 prime mover. The Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific had the largest fleet of them, and actually collaborated with GE and each other (despite being competitors) in the early 1950's to rebuild their entire fleets with water-cooled turbos and upgraded electricals, which resulted in their fleets outlasting just about everyone else's. The SP kept its PAs for Overland Route trains over Donner Pass because the bigger traction motors compared to EMDs E-units made them decent mountain locomotives, and kept most of them in service until the SDP45s were delivered in 1967. The Santa Fe demoted them to secondary lines and mail trains once they acquired enough second-generation passenger power (U28CG/U30GC/FP45) by 1968. What really finally killed them off was the loss of railway mail contracts in 1967. Other roads demoted them to freight service and usually got rid of them as soon as their 14-year bank trust leases were up (around 1961-1963).
The V-12 equipped locos were somewhat better but far from perfect. Southern Pacific acquired a large number of 1600 HP six-axle RSD-5 road units which quickly were banned from their intended service as helpers over Tehachapi and demoted to switcher or branchline service as they kept throwing cranks and turbo blades under load. On the SP, if it couldn't handle the mountains, it was either banished to the Central Valley in California or send to subsidiary T&NO (Texas and New Orleans), so a lot of Alcos wound up spending their final days on branch lines in Texas. SP was so fed up with RSD-5s that it traded in 21 units (the oldest no more than 7 years old) in 1961 to be rebuilt into V12-251 equipped RSD12s. SP however was a sucker for anything with 6 axles, so it and the Cotton Belt (SP subsidiary St Louis Southwestern) purchased 2400 HP DL600B (aka RSD-15) hood units equipped with V16-251s. The 251 models were an improvement but they tended to overheat on the road, and got demoted to switchers as well. SP was one of Alco's biggest (and most loyal customers) but every time SP went to Alco, seems that Alco let them down, with the possible exception of the ten 2000 HP RS32s, Alco's answer to the EMD GP20. The DL643 "Alcohaulics" were complete turkeys, as unreliable and prone to breakdown as the K-M hydraulics. The C628s were decent pullers but smoked excessively and were exceedingly rough on track, the C630's had the same sins but also liked to throw piston/connecting rod assemblies through the sides of engines and access doors under full load. Those 6-axle Centuries wound up as switchers as well, having the series-to-parallel transition capability removed so that their max operating speed was reduced to 25 MPH.
(Another example from the Union Pacific concerning Alco's C855 double-diesel monstrosities:
"For what it's worth, those Alco 855 units (A-B-A) where VERY unreliable and only made one aborted westbound trip out of Council Bluffs, Iowa, back in 1964. They never made it to Fremont, Nebraska, because upon making forward transition just west of Summit, all three units had their side high voltage electric cabinets explode into flames. Some local fire department had to put out the flames, and all three units where towed dead back to Omaha Shops. The Union Pacific NEVER let the units operate in a consist together again! Even the Alco Field Service people couldn't keep them running." http://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/topic/up-alco-c855-diesels)
In fairness, Alco probably built better locomotives overall than Baldwin or Fairbanks-Morse, but certainly not better than EMD. Alco survived because nobody, EMD included, wanted EMD to completely corner the market. The railroads basically wanted another builder to provide competition and keep EMD honest, while EMD itself didn't want to be the subject of an anti-trust suit from the Feds. EMD also understood that with the cyclical locomotive market that they would maximize profits by NOT shooting for 100% of the market, as that last 1/4 of the market would be a rather expensive proposition. As long as Baldwin and FM were the only real competitors to EMD besides Alco, then Alco could survive. Once GE chose to get into the road loco market with the U25B, then it was "game over" for Alco - not necessarily because the early U-boats were a more reliable design in the long run, but because GE had a handle on large-scale manufacturing (AND deep pockets to finance major capital projects) that Alco did not.