How's this for a diesel engine piston?

What you're looking at is a power assembly for an EMD 8-567-B, V-8 diesel engine in a locomotive. EMD Sw8 to be exact...making 800 h.p. Which means as far as lokies go, this one is relatively small. At least by today's standards.

This engine is a V-8 engine, but each cylinder is contained in a neat little power pack that can be removed and overhauled without removing the block. Each cylinder has 567 cubic inches of displacement! So in the case of this particular engine, that's a total displacement of 4536 cubic inches!

What you're seeing here is the mechanic for the Oregon Pacific Railroad, removing and resealing one of the power assemblies on the locomotive, that was leaking.

If these power assemblies needed to be overhauled, they could simply be pulled and swapped out for overhauled units or overhauled and reinstalled, fairly easily. I wish car engines were this handy.

If you want to see some more pictures of this job, check this page out...

http://www.oregonpacificrr.com/Repairing801.html

The owner of this railroad is a friend of mine and has been kind enough to let me play lokie engineer in my spare time for the last few years and I also run a website for them.

The engine that was being worked on is the 2nd engine in this photo.

Our railroad website is the following if anyone is interested...

http://www.oregonpacificrr.com/

Never will be, because cars are increasingly designed to be disposable.

That said, that is pretty awesome!

The AKRR up here just replaced some of their old locomotives, so I wonder what their demise will be?

I like that nice bright red honker rollin down the line, oh yea. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/cheers.gif" alt="" />

google marine diesels for some really big ones. 17000ish cubic inches per cylinder sticks in my head for some reason. Redline at about 80rpms. Enough torque to spin the earth...

Diesel Schmezel... look up turbine engines or aircraft carrier nuclear powerplants... oh wait those are probably classified. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/lol.gif" alt="" />

Looks like a Fairbanks-Morse those things leak oil,like theres no tomorrow

true dat...I worked on the 16 cylinder-opposed piston-big dawgs-attached to my generators for years. ALWAYS leaking.

FE, you're right, the forced induction Colt-Pielstick engines in the bottom of our diesel amphibious ships are hawses. I'm 6 foot-210 and can stand inside the cylinder without my head poking out. We used to go "sump diving" to get it wiped out by hand when we had to take it down for oil contamination. Good times!

Where's Temple at? He's a Navy Engineman...

I would love to work for a small railroad like that again. The UP is such of a giant headless monster. Miss the old D&RGW.

We interchange with the UP and I hear that a lot. They don't seem to be a very popular company with their employees.

My real full time job is also with a giant headless monster of its own in its own industry. Seems that once a decent company is gobbled up into a giant super corporate conglomorant, the entire sheebang devolves into the lowest demoninator and the bottom line, because the only line.