Norfolk Southern has worked a deal to acquire, via EMD/Progress Rail, 100 of Union Pacific's EMD SD9043MAC locomotives. They will be numbered NS 7230-7329 and will initially be used to help with the current motive power shortage. Eventually, these units will be rebuilt, basically as SD70ACe's, but using the SD9043MAC carbody. A detailed roster page with the former numbers for these units will be posted to my website when they are confirmed: http://www.nsdash9.com/roster.html Chris Toth NSDash9.com Also visit my NSDash9 facebook page for the latest NS power updates.
Was there an issue with those units, which led UP to dispose of them? Or were they just returned, going off lease?
UP had a series of problems with them, with cracked frames being the last straw, and they were put in storage. They pulled standard cab 8-40Cs out of storage to replace them.
Sounds like an expensive problem to fix. A significant investment possible, so there must be a big overall savings in there, somewhere. I wonder how NS plans to correct it? Will all of these be slowly run through that mentioned rebuild program, before ever seeing any service? New frames?
UP did not have a series of problems with the 9043s. They are unique in that they are not exactly the same as SD70MACs nor are they SD70ACes, but the 9043s were mostly good. It was the SD90 H-MACs which had issues. The Frame crack issue is already fixed. UP has been cycling the units out of storage and to various shops to get the repair. Fresno is the west coast location (A scab shop as the Roseville team calls it.) Don't know the nature of the fix, but it is fixed. Not a frame replace. If they're replacing the frame it wouldn't be worth all this. That would be like what EMD did for CP on the GP20ECOs. I'm actually surprised, because they have been fixing them and UP is power short as much as NS is. But UP had 300 of them and I think they've only had about 250 in service. And having these laid up for the Frame Crack issue has hurt UP bad. They haven't just pulled up the C40-8s (many of which were sold already) They are bringing up the Wide cabs and the SD60s and SD60Ms It's like it's 1998 around Roseville Engine shops. What we can say is that NS is CLEARLY not expecting to buy Tier4 Locos and has put in many plans to update their fleet. The Dash 8s are all getting rebuilt and they are converting the Dash 9s to AC as well. On this, I'm curious the extent of the rebuild. Are they just going to swap the prime mover to the newer version and redo the radiators for split cooling? Or are they going to also swap out the inverters to the ACe versions. The 9043 is a good platform for a simple swap, but the implication of the statement is that they'll take it down to the frame and rebuild.
BNSF also converted a Dash 9 into what, I guess could be called an AC44C4. It's now an AC unit instead of DC and it's A1A instead of C-C.
As an addendum, I found out over the weekend that the frame crack on these was specifically the mount points for the fuel tank. In fact one unit had the fuel tank simply fall off. This is, to my knowledge one of the biggest fuel tanks ever on a diesel. So I guess not so surprising. It also means that the CP 9043s and the former conrail SD80s have the same problem.
