This Space for Rent

The Baldwin-Westinghouse version of a hot potato

Hot potato, Baldwin-Westinghouse style
Template(s) drawn by Joshua Moldover, via The Railroad Paint Shop, and by myself, via my dining room table

PV&T #282, a fairly modified Baldwin-Westinghouse class B steeplecab, has bounced between 4 owners without going more than about 50 miles away from the carbarn at Parsons Vale at any time (except going to Portland to be rewired from 600vdc to 3kvdc) – originally LW&C #42, the (briefly) PV&T #282, then PVRT #980, then finally PV&T #282 again – and all while being assigned to various switching and local freight jobs on the splat of branchlines radiating out from the tiny little village of Parsons Vale.

Note that it’s sitting on huge trucks (8'6" wheelbase instead of 7") – that’s because the LW&C wanted larger traction motors and two brake cylinders on each truck, and those couldn’t be fit inside the frames of Baldwin’s standard class B MCB truck. It’s also got different windows (the PVRT cut out the old end windows and put bigger ones in, and the center window was replaced with a smaller one when the center section of the cabs were replaced during the conversion to 3000vdc. And the sand pipes are routed outside the frame, so that the driver can hop down and whack them with a broom if they freeze up in the middle of January (they allegedly are supposed to stay warmer inside the trucks, but the experience of other earlier power said that the lines would still freeze up and you’d have to start a small fire below the offending truck to thaw them out, which is a somewhat more involved outside activity that you might want to be doing in the White Mountains in the middle of winter.)

The script Rapid Transit on the cabsides is a PVRT thing, which is on the locomotive because this is the last surviving PVRT power on the PV&T and the MTRR’s eclectic paint philosophy is a bad influence across the entire railroad.