In reply to NickD :
So was there ever a consensus about what was causing the derailment issue?
In reply to NickD :
So was there ever a consensus about what was causing the derailment issue?
Duke said:In reply to NickD :
So was there ever a consensus about what was causing the derailment issue?
Lots of smoking guns, no bullet holes. EMD said it was track conditions and ATSF agreed with that, saying they never had an issue with their similar FP45s. Others blamed the hollow-bolster (weight saving measure) HT-C truck, to the point where UP and SP limited HT-C equipped locomotives to 50mph on their track and Conrail chose to order their SD40-2s and SD50s on old-style Flexicoil Type C trucks. The GE E60Cs used a very similar truck design and were also having derailing issues. Amtrak was convinced it was the water tank, as it was above the frame level, had no internal baffles and was a horizontal tank, instead of the tall vertical tanks of the E-units. Almost every incident did occur with a half-full above-frame water tank on a curve with more than 2 degrees curvature, so you get 600-700 gallons of water sloshing around and that can really jounce things around. And the FRA was convinced that it was a harmonic issue between the baggage car and the locomotive, combined with the lack of alignment control couplers on Amtrak equipment. Honestly, it seems like maybe a bit of all of those combined. But in the end, it was cheaper and easier to just replace the SDP40-Fs, rather than continue to spend the money determining a cause and then engineering a fix for it, especially because EMD cut Amtrak a screaming deal on the F40PHR program to save face. Even if they had fixed them, the SDP40-F would have very likely been haunted for its career by the reputation it had developed and Amtrak would have fought an uphill battle with some lines like BN and C&O to allow it to traverse their rails.
LS_BC8 said:...and we sent some boxcars to Lasalle and Bureau County Railroad for repair.
From what I've read, poor Lasalle & Bureau County took a lot of heat for that and wasn't even involved.
The story that is told is that Penn Central was sending boxcars to the L&BCRR for repairs. The L&BCRR was repairing some and sending them back to Penn Central, and those that were too far gone were being reported back to PC as being scrapped. The commonly told story is that the L&BCRR was actually keeping the "scrapped" cars, repainting them with LSBC reporting marks and put back in service. Then, when one of the cars was interchanged back onto the Penn Central, it was bad-ordered (failed an inspection essentially) and was put on the Repair In Place track. The Penn Central crew starts working on it and finds that it has New York Central markings on the frame, runs the numbers and finds that the car is still listed as being in Penn Central's ownership. The FBI gets involved, the whole thing blows up, the L&BCRR is found to have a bunch stolen boxcars and the nickname for the line became Lets Steal Box Cars (reporting mark LSBC).
Now, the true story, according to someone who was closely affiliated:
The boxcars were part of a 500 car lot of 40' boxcars that were owned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who then leased them to the Penn Central. Penn Central defaults on the lease around '70-'71 and now MetLife owns 500 boxcars that they can either sell or lease to a party willing to pay. Enter Joe Bonnano. Not that Joe Bonnano, just an unfortunate coincidence. He had been running a small leasing program with six 50' gondolas and sees the money to be had in per diem freight car leases and works out a deal with MetLife to run a lease program with 150 of the cars. The remaining 350 were tied up on the Penn Central pending a financial resolution. The 150 cars he was supposed to receive were specifically listed by car number.
Bonnano needed a railroad to base his lease fleet off of, because there was some sort of tax break or business advantage to having them on a railroad roster instead of private owner. So he cuts a deal with LSBC where he will store the cars on their line and use their reporting mark on the cars and in return he will rent out a part of their shop to repair the cars and give them a slice of the lease payments. MetLife sends a list of the cars that the Penn Central needs to send to LSBC at Ladd, IL (the only place where the two lines met) with a list of the specific car numbers that Penn Central needs to send.
Rome is burning at Penn Central, their books and record-keeping and inventory tracking are a mess (Canadian Pacific was "borrowing" Penn Central locomotives being used on a pooled power operation and racking up all sorts of hours on their equipment and PC never noticed) and their employees don't want to go chasing down each specific car number, so they just start sending any boxcar within that number block of 500 cars. About 300 cars arrive at Ladd. Some of them are Bonnano's cars, some aren't, and some of the cars he needs aren't present. Rather than try and get Penn Central to send him the right cars, Bonnano makes a really poor decision and makes a handshake agreement with MetLife that he'll just take the 150 best cars present, fix them up, slap the LSBC reporting mark on them and send the rest back. He does just that and sends the cars out into the wild.
Things play out the same as the other story. One of the cars, which was not in the specified 150, hits the road over the Penn Central, gets bad ordered and moved to the RIP track. A car repairman finds the NYC number on the frame, runs it in the system and sees that the car still belongs to Penn Central. The E36 M3 hits the fan and the Feds get involved (apparently they were really interested when they heard Joe Bonnano was involved, only to find out it was a different Joe Bonnano). It goes to court and Bonnano insists he had this agreement with MetLife but Penn Central knows nothing about it. Meanwhile, the L&BCRR is getting a boatload of bad press for "stealing cars" that they have nothing to do with.
The whole thing settles with a plea deal by Bonnano. He gets a few misdemeanors but no jail time, he gets ordered to return the cars that don't belong to him to the Penn Central, Penn Central gets ordered to find the cars that belong to Bonnano and send them to him, and Lasalle & Bureau Country, disgusted by the whole ordeal, tells Bonnano to get their mark off of his cars and get his cars off of their rails. Bonnano had them moved over to the Cadillac & Lake City, stenciled the cars for CLK, and supposedly leased them out without further incidence.
Apparently Lasalle & Bureau County had a Pepto Bismol Baldwin VO-1000 switcher for whatever reason. The rest of their roster was painted black and white.
NickD said:Apparently Lasalle & Bureau County had a Pepto Bismol Baldwin VO-1000 switcher for whatever reason. The rest of their roster was painted black and white.
That's beautiful.
In reply to NickD :
I'm gonna need to find a way to make an HO scale one of those.
Found this explanation for it, who knows if it's true.
Locomotive #9 was famous (or infamous) for being repainted purple in late 1981 (or "permanganate", because it's the same color as the chemical compound Potassium Permanganate, the primary product of Carus Chemical Company, the owners and only shipper on the LS&BC at that time).
In reply to slowbird :
Bowser makes a Baldwin switcher, just need some paint and decals.
Uh. Whoops. I guess I'll need a track now. And locomotives. And more rolling stock. And shops and houses and buildings and figures and automobiles and crossings and probably some better couplers...
Wow, this is cool(and a little crazy). Someone has resurrected Rock Island Railroad "The Rock"...in northern Mississippi.
For those looking to get started with a model set, this is a pretty good start for the money (although my rule for used is 50% of retail, so I'd offer a bit less than the asking).
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
I'd seen photos of units in Rock Island's The Rock livery, but I thought it was just some tourist line with a locomotive painted in that color. I didn't realize that someone had revived the entire name of the line. Might not have been the best choice to use that particular livery though, since the nickname for it is "Bankruptcy Blue". By the time Rock Island introduced that livery in '75, the line was in the throes of bankruptcy that it would never recover from, abandoning its lines in '80.
Illinois Railroad Museum has an old GP7 in Bankruptcy Blue scheme that looks much nicer than probably any Rock Island locomotive looked during that era.
CB&Q SD24 #504, CRI&P GP7R #4506, AT&SF FP45 #92 and CB&Q SW7 #9255
BN U30C #5383, C&NW FP7 #411, CB&Q SD24 #504 and CRI&P GP7R #4506
That Rock Island blue is real pretty though. Gonna try to get one for my "mismatched train of all the blues and greens I can find"
In reply to slowbird :
If you want greens, check out Illinois Terminal Railroad. They had a rather vivid lemon-lime paint scheme
Reading Railroad's was a little less obnoxious but there was a bunch of different variations across their units
Don't forget GN and their "Big Sky Blue" livery...
In reply to Recon1342 :
Cool paint scheme. Pretty short-lived though. Introduced in 1967, and then phased out in 1970 after the Hill Lines merged into Burlington Northern and went to Cascade Green with white and orange.
In reply to NickD :
I honestly preferred the Pullman Green /Omaha Orange livery that predated it. Still, it doesn't look bad on a car body diesel...
In reply to Recon1342 :
Its interesting that the Great Northern identity reasserted itself on BNSF's new livery after all those year. I'm sure James Hill would be happy though.
Pretty strong parallels in the new BNSF livery
Thank god the infamous "Vomit Bonnet" was a one-off and didn't become the new face of BNSF. They tried mixing the finally colors that BN used with the ATSF Warbonnet layout and the result was terrible. I think the thing that bugs me the most is the font and arrangement of the words on the side of the locomotive. It just look awful all the way around.
In reply to NickD :
Did they steal doors from another loco or have a fire? The number of modern locos I see with burned engine doors is flat disturbing.
In reply to kazoospec :
It's a GE thing, you wouldn't understand. 
GEs, ever since the Dash-9 series have been prone to fires. Turbo seals, leaky injectors, now the newer GEVO units are having sheared/cracked high pressure fuel lines that blow atomized diesel fuel all over the hot exhaust.
I read where UP donated an SD40-2 to a fire department for training and someone remarked in the comments that UP donated an EMD, because the fire departments are already familiar with GEs.
When I see a picture of a GE spitting flames all I can think of are the 47 dead in Lac-Mégantic and the heart of their town that was wiped away. I've spent some time there with work and there is an eerie feeling in town, you can just tell something bad happened and that something is missing and hanging over everything. I can't imagine having that happen in a town I grew up in or trying to move past that, it will define that place from now on. It obviously wasn't the locomotives fault but a E36 M3 operator with lots of small things leading to a terrible tragedy.
In reply to adam525i (Forum Supporter) :
I believe we discussed that one here. Truly an horrific event.
Saw one of these heritage painted CP locomotives rolling into Calgary today.
In reply to Sidewayze :
I wasn't aware they were bringing that scheme back.
Probably my favourite livery.
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