Western Railroad Discussion > distributed power question

hi, i know this question is probably one i should be able to answer already, but.... i was just wondering what the difference is between distributed power and radio control?,please excuse my ignorance!,cheers Derek

Derek Gatt
Sydney,australia, NS

Another question, How is the distributed power controlled, does it respond to the manned loco, are there separate controls, do you have like a separate control panel?

An Engineer can set up the dp locos to mirror what the head end is doing or they can be controlled separately. DP locos have a separate box that controlls the DP locos. IDP is all integrated into the regular LCD screen.

Thank you for the answer

DP at this point in time is radio control as was a similar system, Locotrol, that was in use in the 1960's - 1980's. If the railroads ever switch to wired electro-pnuematic brakes then the DP will probably switch to wired control instead of radio control.

About the only practical difference between the old Locotrol and the current DP is that with DP you can have more than one remote consist. However, the use of multiple remote DP consists is rare. The old Locotrol could also be operated as if it were directly MU'd to the lead consist or it could be split off and operated separately.

UP is using wire link on the new ECP trains, on Donner we run multiple DPU consist on a regular basis.

thanks for that.cheers. derek

Derek Gatt
Sydney,australia, NS

The UP uses multiple DPs on the Moffat and the Joint line all the time. When the BNSF started hauling coal off the Utah RR, the Utah was setting them up with swing dp also. BNSF made them quit.
Only difference in RCE and DP now is that the computer does the work that the engineer did. RCE the engineer had to set and release the air on the Remotes by pushing and pulling buttons in different combinations. Had a SF SD40-2 last year that still had the buttons still attached to the control stand for the RCE air.

>Only difference in RCE and DP now is that the computer does the work that the engineer did. RCE the engineer had to set and release the air on the Remotes by pushing and pulling buttons in different combinations.

Sort of. Basically what you did was simply switch to a different set of controls, you did not use both while set up for RCE. When running a train with the old Locotrol the engineer did not use the standard automatic brake valve at all but instead used the Automatic Brake set and release buttons on the RCE box to operate the brakes on both the master and the slave sets of power. On BN, the regular automatic brake valve was "locked out" by a latch that was dropped down onto the handle to prevent its use except in emergency.

Setting up (linking) the old Locotrol system was much easier and in my experience it always "linked" with no trouble. I can't say that for DP. At least not the early DP. All you did was dial in the slave's number, turn on a circuit breaker, turn a couple of valve handles and they were linked and working. The initial air brake and power tests were similar to DP although the DP's computer helps with some of that today.