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factorone33 — The Greatest Generation
Published: 2009-07-22 08:43:01 +0000 UTC; Views: 1358; Favourites: 42; Downloads: 70
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Description
This one is for Chris, ~classictrains .I also wanted to call it, "The Ultimate Lash-Up", but this one is more fitting.
As you can see, there are literally tons and tons of locomotives sitting dead on these storage tracks. These are the BNSF deadlines, just east of the Topeka Maintenance facilities where the famous Beep used to work , switching around dead , inoperable , or retired locomotives. Up until recently, they've been relatively unused.
I stopped by the other day and checked to see what was there, and was greeted with the sight of countless SD40-2s, GP30s, SD30s, SD38s, GP35us, GP40s, and even a few yard slugs, among other things. Traction that was commonplace on North American rails anywhere from 20 to 40 years ago, hence the title.
I parked the truck in a convenient spot just off the premises and took this panoramic. Despite its breadth and coverage, it does no justice to really show how many locomotives were really parked here. The horsepower had to be in the millions.
Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF 20-35 f/3.5-4.5 USM
ISO 400 @ 1/400, f/6.3
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Comments: 16
I've never seen so many locomotives in my life in one shot 8U
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If i had a regional railroad, I would give all these engines a home!
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Yeah, me too. And give them the requisite cabooses to operate with. ;D
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My god, I never knew that there was that many Ex. AT&SF locomotives still on the BNSF system.
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I'd say a good quarter of BNSF's fleet is made up of ex ATSF/BN units, mostly BN SD40-2s and ATSF GP38-2s/SD40-2S/Dash 8s & 9s/GP30s. They had a huge batch of B23-7s that they retired just last year.
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The GP30's are supposedly retired. This is small compared to what CN has in their dead lines by me.
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Perhaps, but this is 3 tracks deep, and another set behind this that I wasn't able to get to from this angle (which may have been another 2 or 3 lines' worth).
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CN's is about 4 or 5, and it has spilled onto the shop tracks now, and is in two cities lol. All in all about 3 and a half miles worth.
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Ouch! They've a bunch piled in the yard tracks at the shops as well in Topeka, and I imagine there's a bunch somewhere in KC that are gathering dust. What with the economy down, I'll bet everybody's storing old power.
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Great shot!
If BNSF ends up having the same problem with their GEVOs that NS is having, some of that power may go back into revenue service.
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It's possible, but not entirely likely. Most of the Gevo units are/were assigned to interstate traffic, and with the slow economy, most of the older C44s that were pulled off those same routes are likely being reassigned to them again while the Gevos are patched up at the shops during the lull in business.
The transcon going into the greater KC metro area used to see 70+ trains per day; currently, it's down around 35, though I suspect traffic levels are picking up, as I had a heyday this past weekend out railfanning in the area.
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