Worked at a nuke plant that used two of these for emergency generators. They were kept heated and would start in an instant and slammed to 900 rpm and breaker would close in just a couple of seconds. Used air motors to start. The radiators had fan blades that looked like airplane propellers. The room would be nice and warm in the winter but would cool down to outside temp very fast when the radiator started pulling in cold air. The ship I was on in the Navy had 4 of the 16 cylinder versions of the 645 for emergency diesels. They sat right under our berthing compartment and made sleeping impossible if they were running.
To tell the truth this one must have been real cold because it took a long time to start. They don't need air motors. The exciter generator is used as starter motor on these until the engine fires.
I worked at EMD when we started building Super Duties. The first one was so damn big when it came time to move it to paint. It would not go out the door. Made a lot of bosses mad and engineers. Plant manager finally told them to just knock the Damn wall down and get this Big Son of Bitch to paint. True story. I was there.
These are not started with air motors. The Exciter generators are used as starter motors. I've worked on these for years and have the 645 technician certification.
It has/d a very cool diesel powered hotstart when we bought the locomotive and had it painted. Sadly whenever we disconnected the main battery’s to prevent NS from trying to start it in shipping it somehow created a low volt ground that fried and melted all the electrical for it. With as little as we use this thing with how big it is we haven’t really a need to spend the money to fix it or buy a new one.
A couple of volunteers and I swapped the starters on this unit back in 2017 when we were getting it ready for Santa Train. The old 32 volt starters melted the commutators into the engine room floor. These were some beefed up 32 volt starters that went on it to account for some hard cold starts.
