The fan housing, part of the 'cooler group', was removed a couple of weeks ago for cleaning and painting. Seen below the inverted housing shows the modifications made for the installation of a different radiator cooling arrangement. This is simply an additional cowling which takes account of the reduced diameter of the new fan and sits inside the old cowling. The inside of the fan housing probably hasn't seen any attention for thirty or so years and it's in remarkably good condition. Well-built and robust, the repairs will be restricted to a heavy clean and paint, no other work being necessary.

This is a FAQ, but here we go anyway - one of the bigger problems with the original locos was the arrangement for driving the cooling fan. It was mechanically driven (like most EECo. locos) off an auxiliary gearbox on the free-end of the engine. The engine gearbox itself appears to be robust but the cardan shaft between this gearbox and the fan / compressor / traction motor blower was weak and often failed catastrophically, when if failed it often whirled about destroying coolant pipes and anything else in its path. This would result in a loss of coolant and eventually (when the low-level switch in the header tank operated) the engine would be shut down, usually too late to prevent the ill-effects of a high-load shut down.

EE undertook three modifications to try and cure the problem; (1) improve the strength of the shaft (moderate success), (2) fit a coolant-flow switch across the pump to shut down the engine in the event of lack of flow (good move) and (3) make the compressor electrically-driven to reduce the load on the cardan shaft (good move).

We have gone one further and removed nearly all the load on the auxiliary gearbox by (4) removing the traction motor blower at the end and replacing it with an electrically driven one and, best of all (5) installing a hydrostatic fan and drive arrangement. Hydrostatic systems are beloved by the old power equipment engineers because (until the advent of modern control electronics) they can drive the fan at full speed with the engine at idle and provide maximum cooling effort when the engine needs it most - at idle after a high-power run.