Went on vacation to Yellowstone 2 years ago, and only seen 3 MRL units all across Montana, and here's two dang near in my backyard!
MRL does not have a huge active roster. A lot of their traffic is BNSF run through, per terms of their lease. They are an all EMD railroad.
Irony... Found an MRL gondola on a BNSF train in Auburn yesterday, on the last day of its corporate existence. Farewell Montana Rail Link...
Ditto! I helped keep those in service. I even had spent time putting the ex-NYSW's into service. Sad day for those beauties....
I am going to miss them awesome sounding 20 cyl 645's!! Back when that shop was a going concern as LRC, I was on one of MRL's SD45's, and doing an outbound load test after a turbo changeout. The HP on these is easily turned down to 3200 by a potentiometer in one of the pre -2 components. Well, as i was doing the outbound test, my meters gave me a 4200 HP reading!! Standard procedure was to get a different set of meters and verify the readings, so I did that. Same HP. So, got the foreman and he did a triple check, then made me attach it to an external load box to re verify. That is a lot of work, but did that and came up with 4200 HP, again. So, we contacted the MRL foreman and he scoffed at us "non-union scabs" and said to not turn it down, they would verify it themselves. So we sent it over to them. And they just put it into service. Two weeks later, it was back at LRC with a broken crankshaft! So, we rebuilt the engine with a new crank and went over all the rest of it. After reinstalling the engine, back to a new outbound load test. I asked my foreman to see if the MRL foreman wanted us to adjust the HP to 3200? Of course he said please? And so we did a load, I reset the HP to 3200, the engine ran perfectly fine and it went back over there and into service! I believe it was the 354, if memory serves...and it was still in service when I left there. Funny stuff, to me!
