2 Million Mile Detroit Diesel

Originally Posted by mattd
Fire apparatus applications put their reliability to the test, however.

Fire, bus and trash hauling applications are hard for any engine. Some of the local fire departments here held onto to their old Detroit rigs. While the S50 was seen as the black sheep of the Detroit family, one transit agency in the Bay Area has managed to keep their EPA04 fleet of them running. I miss the sound of a 6V-92TA on the streets, I loved the 2-stroke Detroit roar and the Allison whirr.

We still have 4 8V92 ladder trucks in use. I rebuilt one of them a couple of years ago they are great other than leaky. Most of our equipment are ISL 8.3L Cummins in the pumpers but we still do have a few with IH DT530s in them. 4 series 60 Detroit's (3 12.7s 1 14L) and a couple ISX Cummins. The most reliable seem to be the Detriots (both the 2 strokes and S60s) but still need to be overhauled far more than if they were in an OTR Truck. 3 of the series we have are EGR engines the other is DDEC IV

Originally Posted by A_Harman
Originally Posted by ka9mnx
The Series 60 was contracted to John Deere for the design. .


Where did you hear that one? That is absolutely not true. John Deere to this day would not where to start to design a unit injector engine, or one with an overhead cam. The Series 60 was designed at Detroit Diesel by an ex-Cummins engineer that originally designed an OHC prototype engine called the Delta, which Cummins did not proceed with.


I used to haul Series 60 engine blocks made at the John Deere, Waterloo Iowa foundry, to the Detroit engine plant in the 90's. Now I am not sure if Deere had anything more to do with the design or not, but the blocks were indeed sourced from John Deere.

Originally Posted by nthach
Originally Posted by mattd
Fire apparatus applications put their reliability to the test, however.

Fire, bus and trash hauling applications are hard for any engine. Some of the local fire departments here held onto to their old Detroit rigs. While the S50 was seen as the black sheep of the Detroit family, one transit agency in the Bay Area has managed to keep their EPA04 fleet of them running. I miss the sound of a 6V-92TA on the streets, I loved the 2-stroke Detroit roar and the Allison whirr.


Our local bus fleet used to be all GM with the screamin' detroits in them. Sounded like they were going 400 miles an hour when they were barely moving I miss hearing/seeing them around.