mlaughlinnyc posted:It would not make sense to have each generator wired to a single truck. And I fell pretty sure that the throttle did not have two completely separate sets of wiring. With only one engine, you would not want to have power to only one of the trucks. That would have made it impossible to start a heavy train because of wheel slippage. With four motors getting power from only one engine, you could at least start the train but you would have a much lower top speed.
It actually does make sense as two DC generators MUST be isolated from each other or else the one with the higher voltage would destroy the other. Hypothetically speaking, using alternator/rectifier technology, still a few years away after the last E9 was built, two alternators running in parallel on a common AC bus could be rectified to a common DC bus to power all DC traction motors. Should one alternator fail, the remaining operative alternator would still be able to supply ALL traction motors albeit at reduced currents and lower top speed as you pointed out. I doubt that Auto-Paralleling circuitry existed back then meaning the alternators would have to be manually paralleled after both diesels were started. All this is academic as E units were designed to operate at speeds where maintaining all available current to all traction motors simply wasn’t as important as it would be in a freight locomotive frequently operating at high power/low speed.
