Another look at UP 3929 as seen above in Montgomery, AL [03/1990] and UP 3393 in need of a repaint at Birmingham, AL [09/1988].
Here are a few I've taken in the past couple of days... UP 5604 leading a manifest train through Taylor, TX. UP 6516 dragging an empty string of coal cars with 8263 bringing up the rear... 8956 and 8481 putting together a manifest before headed east out of the yard...
That looks like the old GM "Train of Tomorrow" domecar on the right! UP used that on the Seattle-Portland run after they bought that trainset from GM in the 50's, I believe?
Atlanta GA - March 2001 - CSX had a bad habit of "borrowing" brand new units that were en route from GE to their new owners back then
A friend of mine who worked at the UP dispatch center in Spring, Texas told me that they used to pull new power off of trains coming into Houston from the west and replace them with junkers before they let trains go east to New Orleans or they might not see them again for a year or more. And when they got them back, they would be pretty trashed out. CSX would commandeer anything they could get their hands on there.
In the darkest days of Penn Central, PC hostlers were known to steal mu cables off D&H power and other visiting units.
How does that work exactly? Can any railroad just grab whatever loco is handy at the moment even if it doesn't belong to them? I know they have some type of leasing agreement, but I would think that would be for specific equipment. On a related note, I saw a long manifest roll through Taylor today that had a big red Canadian Pacific loco right in the middle of it serving as a DPU. I don't see much CP power come through here so I was a little surprised by that.
I really don't know how that all worked. Perhaps it was a "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness later." type of scenario.
As I have said before, the SP did a heavy amount of interchange with our friends south of the border. I was starting out working at the Burnham shops in Denver. They pushed in a SP SD40, all the traction motors were gone, just had idler wheels under it, the turbo, water pumps the cab interior gone. They would have been $$ ahead to shove it to the scrapper. I cant remember what all we replaced on that thing, it looked like scrap, but ran like new locomotive when it finally left. I always wondered if the SP ever got any of that $$ back.
