Dynamic brake usage in the west in the 1980s?

Hi all,

I'm going to be constructing a small model railroad featuring the Milwaukee Road set in Puget Sound during the mid 1980s (if that date rings alarm bells for you -- you'd be right to question it. But it's going to be proto-freelance, and 'my' MILW is a fighter). According to some people I've talked to, none of the Milwaukee Road's GP38-2s traveled onto lines west, so employing one as a branchline road switcher on my model is already something of a 'no-no.' The issue becomes how far to stretch the truth... there is an obvious difference between proto-freelance and complete fantasy, and I'm stuck trying to pick which engine that least stretches the truth.

As it's impossible to answer this looking at just the Milwaukee, my question revolves around general practice on all Class 1 western railroads during the 1980s. Did any major roads (UP, WP, SP, BN, CP, CN, etc). employ any significant number of non dynamic-equipped units (not even necessarily GP38-2s) west of the Rocky Mountains? The location of my fictional railroad is just north of Bellingham, WA, a localized area that rivals portions of the Midwest for its dramatic flatlands, so I'm don't think dynamic brakes would be required for any GP38-2 doing branchline work there. However, is it just too much of a stretch to think that any railroad would dispatch a unit without dynamic brakes into this otherwise very mountainous part of the country?

Thanks for any and all help.

 

I'm not an authority on western railroading operations, and definately not an expert on MILW.

However, I live in the Appalachian region and I'm familiar with general mountain railroading and Appalachian in particular.

Non-dynamic locomotives are rarely used and rarely seen here. Never say never. A couple years ago, an EX-RF&P GP40-2 (non-dyn) was in consist and on-line on a regular freight over the old B&O West End/Mountain Sub. It was set off with a dynamic equipped GP38-2 and the pair worked local traffic for a week or so before moving on.

Rare, quite rare for non-dyn units to be in mountain country. However, one can and will show from time to time.

The shortline I used to work for had 8 units, one was an old B&O torpedo tube GP9 with no dynamics. We only had to use dynamics on first 12 miles of the railroad, the remaining 40 miles were relatively flat along a river. That one unit never led the big unit trains and usually was deep in consist or helping on the rear.

There was one time when that torpedo Geep did end up on the point of a unit train due to unusual circumstances, nerve rattling ride down the last mountain to the CSX interchange. That's a story for another day.

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