"Nasty" Known to fellow railroaders as "Nasty," Lynn Nystrom is at the throttle of the mighty UP 3985 near Sinclair, WY on a trip to Ogden in 2005. Lynn passed away a decade ago now; he was like a grandfather to me and a kind, knowledgeable guy with plenty of railroad stories he'd tell during model railroad club meetings. Photo with permission.
From the mid-1970s, the EJ&E's Lake Zurich, IL station, about 20 Miles from the end of the line at Waukegan, IL. I found a color photo of it on the Internet and hardly recognized the location. At least it still stands. CN has made this line a busy and important segment of its system.
OK. I found the information. These cabooses, built by Thrall, had electric markers as delivered. They were officially "marker lamp shields". The electric lamps as equipped were much brighter than their kerosene predecessors, so the shields were necessary.
Speaking of green, I've never been able to get a nice shot of NS's SOU Heritage Unit. Snapped these on 10/04/2020 at Columbia, SC, but she wasn't facing properly. This makes the third time I've found the 8099 not well positioned. Maybe next time ......
The letter codes were a Southern Railway thing, designed to assure digits weren't transposed when unit numbers were entered in reports. A formula was devised that used the unit's number to permanently assign a specific letter. Using our Hertiage Unit number 8099, it worked like this: 1. Take the diesel unit's number. Add zeros to the beginning of the number if the it only had a two or three digit road number. [8099] 2. Add the first digit, plus twice the second digit, plus the third digit and twice the fourth digit. If doubling exceeds 9, then add the two digits. In our case 2*9=18 which exceeds 9, so we add 1+8. [8+(2*0)+9+(1+8) = 26 3. Add up the 4 individual numbers [26], then take the digit in the rightmost spot. Subtract that number from 10. [10-6=4] 4. Convert the number into a letter using the following table: 0 = A, 1 = F, 2 = H, 3 = J, 4 = K, 5 = L, 6 = R, 7 = T, 8 = W, 9 = X Easy, right? The SOU stuck with this protocol for many years, until the NS merger when it went out of fashion.
Using the formula, GP-7 8213 unfairly received an F as seen in Knoxville, TN in January 1978. 8+(2*2)+1+6=19 19 10-9=1 1=F
So some of the saplings/young trees we see in the first photo ended up being the big trees in the overgrowth in the second picture. The wonder of nature and sad at the same time. Doug
I agree! It must have taken an MIT staffer or an NSA Codebreaker to concoct such a formula, as well as a manager who thought a solution to the problem of occasionally transposed digits was was vital to the road's survival.
