Greetings followers of the Atlantic Pacific Railroad.
I've had a number of engines in boxes for years on end. They never made it to the layout and what better way to get them in service was to have them painted. My friend in Dedham, MA has done a number of engines for me, which all of you have seen if you're following my railroad. In the last batch, besides the MP15AC and GP50 were two more engines.
The first engine is a GE B23-7 engine. Here's what we all need to know about this engine, courtesy of Wikipedia:
The GE B23-7 is a diesel locomotive model that was first offered by GE in late 1977. Featuring a smaller 12 cylinder version of the FDL engine, it is the successor to GE's U23B produced from early 1968 to mid 1977, but at 62 ft 2 in (18.95 m) long is exactly 2 ft 0 in (0.61 m). longer. It competed with the very successful EMD GP38-2. General Electric also produced a variant, the BQ23-7, no.5130-5139, for the Seaboard Coast Line. A total of 537 B23-7's were built for 9 U.S. customers and 2 Mexican customers.
A B23-7A is a 12-cylinder B23-7 with horsepower boosted to 250 per cylinder or 3,000 horsepower. In 1980 the Missouri Pacific ordered three B23-7A's (#'s 4667-4669, later UP #'s 257-259) and tested them system-wide. The result was the GE model B30-7A, B30-7 with a 12-cylinder FDL prime mover. They were not renumbered into the B30-7A series on the MP because they lacked Sentry Wheel Slip and had different engine governors.
The B23-7 was made by Atlas in their Silver Series. It's DCC ready and all I need to do is drop in a decoder. This engine in prior life was in Metro North colors. Now she lives in AP colors and numbered 2340
The next engine that was painted is a GE U23B, another 4 axle engine.
Some tidbits about this baby, again from our know-it-all at Wikipedia:
Not many U23Bs still exist, but a few shortline and regional railroads still use them in everyday service. The Georgia Central Railway was one of the last U23B holdouts, rostering almost all of the remaining ex Southern Railway (U.S.) high short hood U23Bs. The Georgia Central as of July 2015 has all of its U23Bs off of the roster with the 3965 going to the Southern Appalachia Railway Museum in Oak Ridge, TN.
The Huntsville and Madison County Railroad Authority in Huntsville, AL, operates perhaps one of the last U23B's used in daily freight service, as of October 2015. HMCR 9554 was originally built in late 1974 as L&N 2800. The last U23B built, originally Conrail 2798, and more recently Providence and Worcester 2203, is in regular excursion service at the Naugatuck Railroad, operated by the Railroad Museum of New England in Thomaston, Connecticut.
Western Rail Inc in Airway Heights, WA currently has a U23B that you can lease. It was used on the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad as of 2017 for freight service. It is numbered NIWX 2204 and is a ex Northern Illinois and Western locomotive.
This engine is from Atlas and was from their 'Classic' series more than 10 years old, probably more and was in CSX 'G' livery. This engine will need to be hard wired and will be done at the APRR Electric Shops in Dover, NJ. The shops are currently back logged with electrical work, and probably will be in revenue service sometime in January 2019. She now lives as AP 2350.
Both of these GE units will be assigned to some of the smaller local trains that originate in staging. Since they won't be in consist, they'll be tested on the helix with 8 freight cars to see if they have any issues. They can be run in consist, and that will be determined after the helix test.
While away at a train show a couple weeks ago, I went to a dealer who I knew well. He had a lot of freight cars to sell. I really didn't need any, but I spotted these two and I wasn't going to go home without them! I've been looking for them for a long time and this is the second run they've made.
Here's what I found, Athearn Trinity 3-Bay Covered Hopper, both in KCS! What a find!
PROTOTYPE AND BACKGROUND INFO:
Trinity Steel was founded by C. J. Bender in Dallas in 1933. The company didn’t enter into the railroad freight car market until 1984, when Trinity acquired the railcar designs and production facilities of the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company, once the largest railcar manufacturer in North America. That same year Trinity also acquired the railcar designs of General American Transportation Corporation. In 1986 the rail car designs and production facilities of Greenville Steel Car Company were purchased, including the auto rack designs of Portec-Paragon. Also acquired in 1986 were the railcar designs of North American Car Corporation, and in 1987 Ortner Freight Car was acquired.
With this collective experience across several facilities, Trinity developed many new designs the became ubiquitous to present day railroading. One of their most famous designs is the 3-bay 5161cuft covered hopper. This covered hopper is optimized to transport agricultural products, sugar, dry chemicals, or other similar products and can be seen in unit train assignments all over North America. Introduced around 1995, these cars are extremely common today and owned by many Class 1 and Shortline Railroads alike. (Information courtesy Athearn website)
There were 3 of them in the run and the dealer was going to let me know if he had the third number and bring it to the show the end of January in Springfield, MA
These cars will be assigned to the grain train to service Cargill and Freihofers Bakery.
Thanks for reading!
