Nov 9, 2011

The Good Old days!‏

I was looking at my slides of the Bn a few nights ago and I thiough for the first time how I miss the Burlington Northern
now that the BNSF is in full flower and how boring it has gotten. Here we have 2 of the 3 Bicentennial units together
for the 1976 event. I nice break from BN Green.
Who knew? And if you did how does this unit look to you today? LNG fuel was being considered by the BN and this was
the mother ship to the plan. It normally has a large white fuel tender behind to supply it with fuel but I guess it did not
work out well.
In the magazine about 15 years ago some writer wondered if the BN ever used their Executive F units in freight service.
Well here is proof that they did as they pass under the wood trestle just west of Parkwater yard in Spokane, WA.
Modern BN inherited these old snow plows to get the snow off the tracks by pushing them as fast as they safely could
down the tracks. It worked most of the time.
One way to get old paint off a old locomotive was to use acid to strip the paint off for the new stuff. Soon 828 will work
around Spokane for another 10 years before it too is worn out for further use. My guess was that it was an NP unit. 
Should I do more? We still have Baldwins, fuel tenders, Alcos. I miss the BN Green after all.
Cabless power units were popular for a time with the BN. We have 2 EMD rebuilds going east with 2 GE cabless
built new as B units heading west near Barker Road in the Spokane Valley. This was shot about 20 years ago.
I don't think BNSF has cabless units on the roster anymore. As least I don't see them coming thru town.
All of these models are now gone from the roster. NP SD45's had crankshaft problems and were failing often. The
4075 was an SP&S Alco unit ( I got one of the numberboards!) that just got old and worn out. The 5739 in a GE U33
and have been replaced by thousands of GE Dash 9s by the BNSF.
 

1 comment:

  1. BNSF has almost 30 cabless units still on the roster, mostly ex-ATSF GP60Bs.

    ReplyDelete