Grassroots Railroad Sports?

In reply to NickD :

I was wondering... It has Cargill ghost letters on the hood, and the handrails are clearly add-ons. It's also got the newer rectangular cab windows and is missing the notch next to the cab. The sandbox and single exhaust stack are pretty reliable giveaways, though.

Edit to add: Post-war SW-1 production changes included the single-taper hood, rectangular windows, and in the '50s, dual sealed-beam headlights.

I also found a pic of #13 in its Cargill paint at Minneapolis, MN in 1991, taken by Jim Shepard.

Maybe I'll see if I can dig up a serial number. 

In reply to Recon1342 :

It also gets weird with switchers, especially those working in industrial operations, because they get bastardized pretty quickly. Parts get swapped around, stuff gets modified, etc. Someone on Ahead of the Torch was bringing attention to Tyson Industries selling off their Alco S-3 that they use at their Ogelthorpe, GA feedmill and there was minimal interest expressed because it had had a truck swap, the front pilot was cut off, the radiators were plated off, and it had some sort of Cummins swap (hence the radiator changes). 

I ended up out by Utica yesterday, somewhat unexpectedly, and made the decision to swing by Utica yard to see if there was any leased power at the NYS&W, since that's usually he harbinger of the big spring feedmill traffic surge. Nothing there yet. I also swung over to the Adirondack's part of the yard and saw all their power present and accounted for. Looks like the #3573 is back together and possibly back in service. I also checked out the new coaches they acquired from Finger Lakes Railway.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, so I was reliant on my phone. But while I was there, a CSX freight came pounding west, and I thought something looked odd with the second unit, so I decided to try and get a photo. Yep, it was the B&O heritage unit.

Really bizarre though was the eastbound continuous welded rail train being pulled by pure BNSF power.

In reply to NickD :

Yeah, those are definitely a little far from the home rails...

Where is BNSF based out of? I have been seeing their units up here in Saskatchewan alot helping on CN work.

In reply to Recon1342 :

I assume the stick rail was CSX's but it was odd seeing them use presumably pooled power in basically MoW work.

In reply to DjGreggieP :

BNSF is headquartered out of Fort Worth, TX.

They have rails as far east as Chicago, IL (NE) and Birmingham, AL (SE).

That being said, most Class I railroads have "pool power" agreements with each other, and many share trackage rights as well.

In reply to DjGreggieP :

BNSF's headquarter is in Fort Worth, TX. But they were largely created from Santa Fe, Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Frisco, SP&S, CB&Q and Frisco, so you've got the southern transcon line from the ATSF main, then a bunch of PNW trackage from the GN, NP and SP&S (the Burlington Northern part), and then Frisco, CB&Q, and ATSF had a ton of midwest trackage.

Red is BNSF rails, pink is trackage rights over SP/UP.

Why is their stuff in Canada? Either leased power, on run-through assignments, or settling horsepower-hour accounts. Run-through or pooled power is a way to reduce downtime. Rather than stop a train where Railroad A hands off the cars to Railroad B and swap locomotives, you just change crews and continue on with the same power. It's faster and simpler, as long as Railroad B doesn't have some sort of unique cab signal system that Railroad A doesn't have and so doesn't have their power equipped with.

Horsepower-hour ties into pooled-power agreements. Say, Railroad A sends four 3000hp SD40-2s onto Railroad B's tracks and they're there working for 3 hours on a run-through agreement. 4x3000x3=36,0000 horsepower-hours, so Railroad B now owes Railroad A 36,000hp hours. Now, to fulfill that, Railroad B sends three 4000hp ES40DCs over for 3 hours, or two 1500hp GP15-1s for 12 hours, and their accounts are even.

Now, typically a run-through agreement keeps accounts fairly even, but you can get into situations where your horsepower-hour accounts get seriously out of balance. The big one that comes to mind was when CSX and Pan Am Railways tried run-through service. CSX was constantly sending C44-9Ws and ES44ACs (both 4400hp) east on Pan Am, but Pan Am had tried to go entirely with 3000hp 40-series EMDs (SD40s and GP40s) for their roster. Whenever Pan Am tried to send them west, CSX almost always turned Pan Am's power away due to the extreme poor condition, so Pan Am's horsepower-hour accounts were always in arrears. Even when they did get to send their power onto CSX rails, the old 3000hp EMDs couldn't rack up horsepower hours fast enough, both due to the lower horsepower and because CSX's better track conditions allowed less time on their system. Pan Am's system was full of 10mph restrictions and derailments, so the 4400hp CSX GEs hung around a long time on PAR and racked up huge hours. CSX eventually ended up selling Pan Am some C40-8s and C40-8Ws both to ensure that their own power wasn't always tied up on Pan Am, and to allow Pan Am to try and settle accounts. Ironically, those Dash-8s ended up back on the CSX roster a few years later when CSX bought out Pan Am.

Today marks the 49th anniversary of Consolidated Rail Corps., better known as Conrail.

In reply to NickD :

I just saw this one for April Fools, but I honestly wish it was real. 

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

I saw a couple funny ones. One was that Amtrak was donating the entire 70 car fleet of sidelined Horizon coaches to IRM.

Another was that Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington was partnering with East Broad Top to build a 3'-gauge 2-6-6-2 for the EBT. (The EBT looked at ordering 2-10-2s during their common carrier years, D&RGW looked at building 3'-gauge 2-8-8-2s out of K-36s, and Uintah Railway had 3'-gauge 2-6-6-2Ts, so there is precedent.)

East Broad Top had this gem: "After more than 60 years of dormancy, the historic East Broad Top railroad is to be restored from Rockhill Furnace to Saltillo. APRIL FOO... wait, what? We're already ACTUALLY doing that? Cool, nevermind then!"

Western Maryland Scenic joked that they were going to paint their B32-8, #561, in this half WM/half Chessie System livery, that honestly goes kind of hard, in my opinion.

WMSR posted some pretty cool photos of a one-way excursion hosted by CSX and MARC that used two of CSX's corporate F-units and a MARC F-unit pulling MARC coaches that ran from Washington D.C. to the WMSR at Cumberland, and then up the WMSR to Frostburg. The passengers were all bicyclists, who then disembarked at Frostburg to make roughly the roughly 150 mile ride back to D.C.. Its cool seeing any photos of the CSX F-units, and to see them hauling an excursion around Helmstetter's Curve is pretty wild.

And arriving in Frostburg.

In reply to NickD :

Oh damn, a trip like that would be awesome!

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

It's also just really crazy to equate the current CSX with this sort of stuff. For a while, CSX tried operating RoadRailers carrying auto parts from Detroit to Atlanta, and they assigned their corporate F-units to it. So in the late '80s you could find F-units hauling hotshot RoadRailer trains on CSX rails, which was pretty strange.

As classic as the F-units are, and well-represented in preservation as they are, it's kind of shocking that the EMD FT, "The Diesel That Did It", is so poorly represented in preservation. There are exactly two EMD FT A-units in preservation, one of the original FTA demonstrators at the National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis and an ex-Northern Pacific FTA at a museum in Mexico City, Mexico. There are also three FTBs, one is a gutted ex-Southern shell converted to a heater car erroneously displayed in EMD demonstrator colors at Virginia Museum of Transportation, there's an ex-Southern B-unit at National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, and a third at North Carolina Musuem of Transportation in Spencer, NC. That's it, two FTAs and three FTBs. There are as many Baldwin RF-16s as EMD FTAs, and twice as many Alco PAs. And none of the FTs are displayed as A-B sets despite being built as semi-permanently coupled A-B sets.

A big part of the FT's poor survival rate is probably due to being pretty early diesels. Most were delivered in WWII and got the wheels run off them, and then they were traded in on F3s or F7s or Geeps. There's a photo out there of B&M FTs headed through Pennsy's yards in 1956, on their way to be traded in on GP9s, while the PRR still had quite a few active steam locomotives. Even those that weren't traded in in that manner weren't really considered for preservation because no one was interested in preserving diesels at the time. And the FTs didn't have quite the long life of F3s and F7s because the FT had some weird differences compared to later F3s, F7s and F9s. The FTs had manual transition, a weird belt-drive system for the cooling fans that was maintenance-intensive and required the fireman to adjust speeds and open and close shutters in the body, and the A-B sets were semi-permanently coupled together. The F3 went to automatic transition (although some like the NYO&W ordered their F3s with manual transition to play nice with their FTs) had electric fans with thermostatic control, and A and B units could be uncoupled and mixed and matched for operational flexibility. Some railroads later reconfigured their FTs with couplers on both ends, but there was no cheap or easy way to get around the inferior D8 generator or manual transition, and fixing the funky cooling system was fairly insurmountable without ludicrous reengineering and expenditure.

O&W FT #601 at Middletown, just weeks before the O&W's abandonment. The #601 was kind of an interesting case in that it was financed for O&W by Standard Oil Co, unlike the rest of their FTs, and F3s and NW-2s and 44-tonners for that matter, which were financed by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Standard Oil wanted to use a locomotive basically as a rolling laboratory to test new lubricants on, since mainline diesels were all new and had new requirements, and the NYO&W needed money for new power, so Standard Oil financed #601A/#601B and in return they got to do all sorts of research with the engine. The O&W worked well for Esso, since it's short length and meager traffic meant the #601 wouldn't stray too far from homebase for too long. The #601 couldn't be dispatched without Esso approval during the initial test period, to make sure it had fresh fluids and test instruments in place, and on the occasions it did get sent out without Esso's approval, O&W employees were called on the carpet.  NYO&W in the Diesel Age by Robert E. Mohowski mentions how the O&W really didn't have any service facilities ready, and when the #601 arrrived they had to drain and fill the crankcase immediately. Cue a 200-gallon bucket brigade to dump new engine oil into the 567A.

The #601 was the only 600-series diesels on the O&W, as part of their numbering system. The O&W decided that single-unit road power would be in the 500s, so all the F3s were in the 500 series, since they could be run independently. The 600 series were for two-unit power, and since the #601 was to be used by itself, it was the only power in the 600-series. The 700 series was for three-unit power, and there was never such a thing owned by the O&W (they never purchased any A-B-A sets of F3s for examples) so that remained vacant. And the 800 series was for four-unit power, and the intent was to run FTs in solid A-B-B-A blocks, so they were all numbered in the 800s.

Two D&RGW FT sets with a 65-car freight at Pinecliff, CO on  April 14th, 1947. Interestingly, the #543 is sporting the angled F3-style numberboards, instead of the FT numberboards that were parallel to the body sides. I found reference to the #543 being wrecked and rebuilt by EMD, but that claimed that that didn't happen until 1949. So either that was incorrect, or Otto Perry's photographer notes were off by two years. 

Another D&RGW FT set at Coal Creek. Leader #550 has the proper FT-style numberboards. The Action Road's long tunnels and steep grades made it a natural home for "The Diesel That Did It", and other than the narrow-gauge lines, which remained steam powered until the D&RGW rid themselves of the last of them in 1981, they quickly converted to diesel power.