I saw in a 'UP Trackside' book a joint UP/Q train with matched GP30's from both RR's.. When did these trains begin joint ops, how long after the BN merger did they continue? Were the hot priority?
Yes Hemi it happened both with the GP30's and I believe even with matched GP20's. Typically the Q had two of their GP30's in the lead with four UP GP30's folloed by one CB&Q GP30 trailing unit in the consist. Mike Spoor has some photo's from 1964 in his book The CB&Q in Color Volume Two. When I get back home this afternoon I'll post better facts rather than memory. Would be a fun train to model in N scale.
The Q/ UP trains were hot Chicago- Denver and points west trains In the GP 30 days the lash-ups were CBQ/UP/UP/UP/CBQ. Some times the UPs would be only B units so then a nice ABBBA Lash up would occur. The Q/UP run-though lasted from the mid 50s to mid to late 60s. I have never seen pictures or heard of the BN doing this in its early days with UP, so my guess would be that the Q/UP agreement with runthrough power ended by this time.
Ironically, many of those UP GP30's were sold to the BN in the mid to late 1980's and rebuilt into GP30M's by Morrison Knudsen. Good news for Fans like me.
And many still are in BNSF service. Just goes to show, old Geep 30's never die, they just get rebuilt, and work for the competition!:w20z6q:
IIRC, it was train GI, and ran from Chicago to Grand Island on the Q, then was handed off to UP for forwarding west. I remember reading in an old issue of Railfan about editor Jim Boyd's former life as an EMD employee, riding new locomotives for the various Class 1s. For the record, I refer to UP before 1982 as pre-Borg.
Back when Ultimate Predator was a respectable RR? Seems like ages ago, when UP wasn't trying to gobble up everything west of the Big Muddy.. I shamelessly borrowed that from MOPMAN...:angel:
Ok, Hemi it just so happens I have a GP30 I'm painting in N in CB&Q when I remembered this post, so I got out one of my favorite books by Michael J. Spoor. In his book Chicago, Burlington & Quincy In Color, Volume 4 he shows many pictures of this C-GI train. It looks like the joint C-GI train started as early as 1961 as the first locomotives pictured are GP-20's. After 1963 the C-GI was made up of a CB&Q and UP GP30's. Number of units varied but it was always CB&Q on bothe ends with UP in the middle. Emery Gulash, took a few of the photo's. It is photo's like this which makes me think about back dating my layout.
Emery Gulash.. Great videographer... Nearly the equivalent of Otto Perry in video! Didn't know Emery was a photo man as well. Great, ANOTHER book I want...mg:
