An Additional Tribute To The EMD Special Duty Engines

Hello everyone and welcome to a special post on my blog. 

Some of you may have seen Sir John's blog post on EMD Special Duty (SD) engines. This was a great post and covered many of these engines from SD9's all the way up to SD45 and some variants to them. EMD also rolled out some SD50's (Article about them here) and SD60's (Article about them here) as well as SD70's and variants to them (Article about them here), SD80MAC's (Article about them here) and SD90MAC engines (Article about them here).** 

We're going to stay in Sir John's time frame as he asked me about my SD38, SD40 and SDP45 engines.

Let's look at my SD38 engine. It's made by Athearn and was made DCC ready, so all I did was add a non-sound decoder. Here's the background on the real SD38, courtesy of Wikipedia. 

The one made by Athearn does match the series they made, although no image was on the fallen flags site. Here's my engine...

The SD40 engine that I have, made by Athearn and is MIA somewhere deep in the annals of the APRR storage facility (basement) and will not make a cameo for this post (Sorry Sir John). My engine is 6241 and here's a photo of an Athearn SD40 in a box...

Here's the photo of the prototype SD40...

Now we turn to the SDP45 engines. Here's the backgound information on these special engines. The EL had 19 engines made for them (EMD_SDP45 Information). They do have larger fuel tanks and I have 3 of these. 

Two of them are in EL and one is in Conrail. Conrail did get many of these from the EL. Here's the images of the prototypes that Athearn made...

Here are the models on my layout. All three are Athearn Genesis engines. All 3 have sound...

Here's how these three engines sound idling in Rock Ridge Yard...

The crew at Rock Ridge Yard decided to bring over the SD38 and pose for another photo op...

Now that the photos have been taken, it's time for the EL engines to make a short run on the railroad...

I hope you enjoyed this post and we can all thank Sir John for bringing these engines to the limelight on his blog...

** Articles courtesy of Wikipedia. 

** All photos of prototype engines courtesy of rr-fallenflags.org website and the folks who have contributed to the site...

Thanks for reading!!