Grassroots Railroad Sports?

There's already been questions about when/if Saratoga, Corinth & Hudson will repaint the #4103 and #4118 into the blue, gray and yellow "lightning stripes", and basically the answer was that the two RS-3s have fairly good paint and the black and yellow paint is also correct for the D&H. It will also match the Alco S-2 "D&H #3021" (actually ex-US Army, ex-Long Island Rapid Transit) that Saratoga, Corinth & Hudson already has. Just like the RS-3s were largely retired on the Delaware-Lackawanna because two RS-3s could be replaced by a single M630 or M636, a single one of these RS-3s can replace both of SC&H's S-series switchers.

Also, when questioned about repainting the RS-3s, SC&H replied that they will be acquiring additional motive power in the near future that will wear the D&H "lightning stripe" livery. Which seems like it almost has to be either RS-36 #5019 or one of the CPKC ex-LV/ex-D&H GP38-2s. SC&H also replied to one of my comments, saying I was expecting that, and I got a response of "Time will tell..." Hal Raven has said that they are in constant talks with the private owner of the #5019 and are planning to go do some work on it, where it's stored up to North Walpole, for the owner.

The #5019 worked for the Upper Hudson River Railroad, who lost the contract to operate the line in 2011. It was stored up at North Creek when Iowa Pacific Holdings when IPH took over the line and began running it as the Saratoga & North Creek. Then, after Iowa Pacific imploded in 2019 and the line went up for sale, the #5019 was dragged down from North Creek to Saratoga Springs, and then was moved up to North Walpole, NH for storage in 2020.

Kevin Burkholder caught the rescue move of the #5019 on the evening of July 18, 2020. The famous Alco S-1 #5, which was the Schenectady factory switcher, was fired up for a trip over the entire former Saratoga & North Creek Railroad property. The rescue operation is seen at Thurman, NY, where the #5 was run around to the rear of the consist and provided the power to shove the two pieces of equipment to the CP interchange near Saratoga Springs, NY. The #5 stayed on the property, along with a bunch of ex-SNC coaches, and was purchased by Hal Raven for the SC&H. I rode in the cab of the #5, which now looks much nicer, and the engineer joked about how, when preparations were beginning to start the SC&H, that they had "a locomotive that looked like a cancer patient".

The #5019 being shoved over the Sacandaga Creek just south of Hadley. Currently, the SC&H can't run north of Corinth, because that section of line is operated by Revolution Rail and they run railbikes over the line. But once a year the SC&H does get a temporary waiver to run from Corinth to Hadley for the Hadley Maple Festival, and they do cross this bridge. I've wanted to get photos of that run, but both years I've had something else going on. A lot of people hope that the SC&H eventually gets back to North Creek, but the ownership of the northern end by Revolution Rail complicates matters, and Hal Raven has said the northern end of the line really needs a lot of work and they also are still growing the SC&H and don't want to overextend themselves.

I drove past NewHope &Ivyland's Upper Mountain yard today and I think the parked engine you've shown was missing. It was there 2 weeks ago.

In reply to TurnerX19 :

Oh, the big ex-Conrail C39-8, #8212? Unfortunately it's probably been reduced to razor blades, which is sad, because it was the last early C39-8 left, and there is only one other C39-8, a later C39-8E, still in existence. But there's not a lot of demand for GE Dash-8s on the secondhand market, and the #8212 had suffered some sort of mechanical failure that took it out of service as well.

Of course, if Saratoga, Corinth & Hudson does get the #5019, they run into the issue of trying to support three different Alco engines. The early Macintosh & Seymour 539/539T inline-6 in their S-1 and S-2, the Alco 244 V12s in the RS-3s, and then the 251 V12 in an RS-36. And Alco engines have zero parts crossover between the engines. Nothing is the same between a 539, a 244 or a 251. This got even more confusing because Alco was churning out locomotives using different families of engines at the same time. While the 244 was rolled out in '46 in the PA-1 and and FA-1 and RS-2, Alco was still building 539-powered RS-1s until 1960 and introduced the 539-powered S-3s and S-4s in June of '49. And then when the RS-11 ushered in 251 V12 in February of 1956, Alco was turning out RSD-7s with 244 V16s (which Alco called a 250 to try and distance themselves from the 244s reputation) until April of that year and 244 V12 RS-3s until August of that year. So, you simultaneously had 539-powered RS-1s and S-2s and S-4s, 244-powered RS-3s and RSD-7s, and 251-powered RS-11s and RSD-12s all rolling off the factory floor. 

Meanwhile, EMD put a single engine in everything during a single era. When EMD was putting out 567s, that was all they were building. There were minor differences, like cylinder count (V6, V8, V12, V16) and aspiration (Roots-blown or turbo) but parts were all interchangeable, excepting some of the early really exotic blocks. You could yank the turbo off of a GP30 and convert it to a Roots-blown configuration, basically making it a GP18 in a cool body, or add a turbo to a GP9 and make it basically a GP20. When EMD introduced the 645, they stopped building locomotives with 567s and strictly built 645s, but even then, a 645 was literally just an overbored 567. You could drop 645 power assemblies onto a 567 bottom end and have a 645 engine, and lots of railroads and locomotive rebuilders did just that. And when the 645 reached it's limits, they took a 645 and stroked it and you ended up with the 710 engine, and again, they stopped building locomotives with the 645 and went all in on the 710. The fact that General Motors built the EMC/EMD engines really shows here, since it's not unlike how you could mix and match parts from small block Chevys.

And that was just engines. While EMD had one field control system for generator output, Alco had three different field controls (Split-pole, amplidyne, and static field) in production. The main thing was that EMD preferred to slowly add refinements to their products, whereas Alco tended to make huge evolutionary leaps that weren't compatible with older stuff. Obviously, the Alco situation caused many extra headaches for the stores people, but worst of all, it really hit home on the shop floor. The machinist or electrician who had spent years building up what his personal knowledge base on repairing an RS-3., when initially confronted with an RS-11 discovered that much of that knowledge base went right out the window. So, that RS-11, which was a better locomotive than the RS-3, appeared to be more problematic because the shop guys were back at the bottom of the learning curve.

Alco also never really got into the update/rebuild/repower program. EMD was rebuilding all sorts of stuff in the '50s and '60s. Some of it was their own products, like upgrading the B&O's EMC EAs and ATSF's E1s and E3s into "E8Ams" or upgrading older end-cab switchers to SW8 spec or taking old Great Northern FTs and converting them to "GP5s". There was also a lot of rebuilding competitors products with EMD powerplants at the La Grange plant, like 567-powered DL-109s for Milwaukee Road and Rock Island, repowered F-M C-Liners and Erie-Builts and Baldwin DR-4-4-1500s for New York Central, an EMD-ized Alco PA for ATSF, MKT's RS-3ms, or the whole rebuild program on EJ&E's big Baldwin DT-6-6-2000s. EMD also provided components and support for a lot of railroads that were DIYing it at their own shops.

Alco never outright offered any large programs to rebuild older 244 locomotives with 251 power, or if they did there isn't any documentation of it, and they didn't really do a lot of repowering of foreign equipment either. The only real instances of 244-to-251 upgrades that I can find were a couple of Alco FA-2s owned by Lehigh Valley that Alco installed 251 prototypes into for road-testing, and MLW rebuilt some Canadian National FPA-2s into "FPA-2us" that were basically FPA-4s afterwards. While there were a bunch of RS-3s repowered with 251s, those were all either done by an outside contractor (Morrison-Knudsen did the D&H's RS-3us and PA-4us) or in a railroad's own shop (like Green Bay & Western's RS-20s). Likely part of that was because it wasn't as simple as removing a 244 and bolting a 251 in it's place, or swapping power pack assemblies, like on an EMD. A lot more engineer was required.

When it came to repowering non-Alco equipment with Alco prime movers, there are only two instances that I can find. The first was the A-B-A set of Alco RF-16s that Alco did for PRR in 1959. With Baldwin having left the market, and a sizable roster of Baldwin diesels that now didn't have large-scale support, PRR sent an A-B-A set of Baldwin RF-16s (#2001A, #9583B, #9726A) to Schenectady. They had their Baldwin/De La Vergne 608A engines removed and an 1800hp 12-251B engine installed, along with a GE GT-581 maine generator. They did retain their Westinghouse 370 traction motors, which were robust, if difficult to service and replace. There is no mention of other electrical gear (GE vs. Westinghouse), other than to say that their original pneumatic throttle/M.U. system was replaced with electric, which allowed them to mate with other makes and models. Returned to PRR as #9632A, #9632B and #9633, they performed quite well, but the rebuild program was found to be too expensive to warrant further duplication and there were also supposedly issues with the cooling systems. In any case, it didn't extend their lives in any noteworthy fashion, with the #9632B done by May of '65 and the two A-Units retired by July of '66. Meanwhile, New York Central still had 608A-powered RF-16s on their roster until 1967, and they then went and ran over on Monongahela Railway for another 7 years, before ending up on the D&H until '77.

The other one, which was actually replicated, was the Wabash's Fairbanks-Morse H-24-66s that Alco swapped with 2400hp 16-251s. There's not a ton of details on these, so I don't know if they kept the Westinghouse generators and traction motors, but they were done by Alco to all eight of Wabash's H-24-66s. The major visual difference was the addition of air filter boxes like an RS-36s along the front of the long hood. The conversion was done just six months before Wabash was merged into N&W along with the Nickel Plate, AC&Y, and P&WV, and it's odd that they were done that late. I have to wonder if N&W would have preferred they been left with their F-M power plants, since F-M already had regular H-24-66s on their roster from when they had absorbed Virginian, and now had regular Train Masters and mongrelized Train Masters as well. They ran for a while for NS before both the Virginian units and the Wabash units were cut down to make slugs out of.

Alco Power Inc. (the remains of Alco after White Industrial Power sold it off) and later Bombardier did sell some really interesting kits to rebuild an RSD-4 or RSD-5 into an API-620 or a BX-620. It replaced the 1500hp or 1600hp 12-244 with a 2000hp 12-251F, a new short nose, a new cab and a long hood that was akin to an RS-36 or M420. The API-260 had a short hood like a GE U-Boat, while the BX-620 had a short nose similar to a C424/C425. As far as I know, the only railroads to take advantage of this were down in Mexico, since by the '70s, pretty much all the early RSD-series locomotives were gone in the US and Canada.

There are account of Alco at least proposing repower programs for some other railroads, but none of them went forward.

A big one was that supposedly Jack Brannon, Chief Mechanical Officier of the LIRR, approached Alco about repowering the old Fairbanks-Morse CPA-20-5s and CPA-24-5s with 251 power. Brannon's dislike for F-M products was thorough, citing the difficulty of working on the opposed-piston prime movers, the Westinghouse generators being prone to flashover when hitting diamond crossings or switch frogs, particularly on the 2400hp CPA-24-5s, and the C-Liners being notorious switch-pickers, with their 5-axle B-A1A truck arrangement. LIRR already had Alco S-1s, S-2s, RS-2s and RS-3s, so there was some familiarity with Alco products, and LIRR simply requested that the unit be capable of 2000hp after rebuild. Reportedly, Alco felt that only an 1800hp locomotive would be possible with the F-M electrical and cooling system, and the extent of the modifications would have made the rebuild more expensive than just buying new locomotives, so the CPA-20-5s and CP-24-5s were instead traded in towards passenger-equipped Alco C420s.

The D&H tried out a batch of RS-3s swapped with 251s, called an RS-3u by the D&H, but the conversion was done by Morrison-Knudsen, who called them TE56-4As. The D&H actually planned to do the conversion themselves, and bought an RS-3 shell off of B&M and got as far as chopping the nose before deciding to contract the work out. Morrison-Knudsen configured them to run short hood forward, cut down the short hood, raised the long hood 6 inches, moved the dynamic braking gear to the long hood in a boxy enclosure, and swapped the 1600hp 12-244Cs for 2000hp 12-251Cs. 

While I like how the RS-3us look, I've learned in recent years that the D&H crews absolutely hated them. The upgrade from 1600hp to 2000hp was just too much for something the size and weight of an RS-3, and it took a locomotive that was known to be a low-speed lugger and turned it into a wheelslip-prone mess. Crews nicknamed them "clubfoots" over their poor traction, and the joke was that every time an RS-3u had routine maintenance done the crews replaced the wheelslip alarm buzzer and light because they were burnt out from constant use. D&H/M-K probably would have been better off using the 251s at RS-11 (1800hp) or RS-36 (1600hp) spec. The RS-3 cooling system also was supposedly not up to the task of cooling a 2000hp engine, making them overheat when worked hard, and M-K's conversion process was also said to be done rather haphazardly. Wiring and plumbing was run completely different from unit to unit, not unlike what Baldwin was infamous for. 

They hung around until the end of the Guilford era, but I suspect that was purely because the D&H was constantly short of power and they were in good condition, with fresh engines and a pretty thorough rebuild. I know it was said that dispatchers learned to not put more than one RS-3u in a consist, so that trains didn't get stalled out on grades when multiples would get into wheelslip or overhead, but also that they didn't play nice with bigger power, like the U33Cs, so they were preferably matched with RS-11s or RS-36s or C420s. One guy recounted that as a kid he saw a solid set of them climbing Richmondville Hill while out on a hike and he said that he stopped for lunch and the entire time the train was visible because it was only doing a couple miles an hour.

Chicago & North Western had a pair of RS-3s that were 251-swapped by Alco themselves. The #1613 and the #1624 were both smashed up in a wreck and Alco repaired them, using 1800hp 12-251Bs out of an RS-11. They even placed RS-11 long hoods on the frame, which resulted in some ungainly, hunchback machines. No word on how they performed, but they lasted until 1980-1981, while the unrebuilt RS-3s started being retired in 1969 and were gone by 1975.

Green Bay & Western rebuilt some of their own RS-3s with 2000hp 12-251Cs and chopped the short hood as well, but they called theirs "RS-20s". I don't think the GB&W had the terrain or the train lengths that the D&H did, so they likely never had the wheelslip or overheating issues, and they seemed to last fairly long on the GB&W.

Of course, some of the most famous 251 repowers were the D&H's PA-4us. While the later 12-cylinder 244s were pretty good, the 16-cylinder 244s, as used in the PA-1s, PA-2s and RSD-7s, had a much worse reputation and wasn't really produced enough to ever really get sorted out. By the time the D&H got the four operational PA-1s from ATSF in '67, they were headed for 20 years old, and the 2000hp 16-244 were petty cantankerous. The D&H shops did their best keeping them running, but it was rare that all four were operational and they were often supplemented with RS-3s, RS-36s or borrowed Erie-Lackawanna E8s as well. By the end of regular passenger service in 1971 at least two of the PA-1s were out of service. They kept the other two running for office car specials, shipper specials and occasional railfan excursions and in '73 they tried to revive the #17 only for it to immediately break a connecting rod and saw a hole in the block, resulting in a temporary 12-244 swap just to get back it in service for an excursion.

Amtrak had dumped the Laurentian's New York-Montreal route on it's formation, but enough demand resulted in state and federal governments reinstating the route as Amtrak's Adirondack, and since Amtrak was still trying to get it's feet under it, D&H agreed to run the route with their equipment and crews. They talked the state into giving money to rehab the tracks and to rebuild the PAs into more reliable motive power. The four PA-1s were sent out to Boise, Idaho, one at a time, for rebuilding by Morrison-Knudsen (this was two or three years before the RS-3u program) and had their 2000hp 16-244Gs removed and replaced with 2400hp 12-251Es, like were used in MLW M424s and Bombardier HR412s. There was also considerable electrical system work, since the early GE electrical systems on these were reported to be pretty nightmarish as well. Everyone likes to blame Alco's 244 engine design for tanking Alco's reputation in general and the PA's reputation in particular, but it's worth noting that a lot of the 244 problems were because of the air-cooled turbocharger that GE insisted Alco use, and when several of the Class Is did major reworks of their Alco PAs to try and improve reliability, they focused heavily on redesigning the GE electrical system.

The PA-4us, as they were called afterwards, returned to D&H working the head end of Amtrak trains on the way east. They ran pretty well for the D&H, although their service was pretty short. They went out for rebuild in '73-'74 and by '77 Amtrak took over the Adirondack fully after a number of disputes with the D&H, predominantly that it was supposed to be an Amtrak train that was run by D&H crews and equipment but was being presented by the D&H as a fully D&H operation. They were leased to MBTA briefly, then sold off down to Mexico and promptly destroyed. Two of them have been restored in Mexico, and the other two hulks came back to the US. Ironically, the one that Doyle McCormack got has further evolved, with a 2000hp 251F from an M420 being installed, giving it the right horsepower for a PA-1 but the wrong engine family and cylinder count. There was a 16-244G found for the other repatriated PA-1, it was an old stationary generator with low hours, but the museum restoring that locomotive passed on it because the re-engineering by M-K to fit the 12-251 was so extreme that they thought it would just take far too much effort to convert it back to original 16-244 power.  

One of the stranger ones was the pair of Louisville & Nashville GE 70-tonners that had their Cooper-Bessemer engines replaced with Alco 6-251 inline-6s. They had to have taller hoods installed to fit the engines, and they also have some amusingly tiny angled numberboards. They worked the Hartsville Branch after conversion, and then were eventually sold off. The #98 went to work for a Tropicana plant and eventually ended up at the Tennessee Central Railroad Museum, while the #99's fate is much less clear. 

Where it got really weird was the MLW RSC-24, an odd runty looking little machine. In 1955, before the MLW FPA-4 or the 251 engine was officially out, Montreal Locomotive Works convinced CN to send them two FPA-2s and two FPB-2s (passenger variant of the FA-2) to have the 1600hp 12-244C removed and installed 1800hp 12-251Bs. These completed locomotives were called FPA-2Us, and one of them actually survives up on the New York & Lake Erie as their #6758.

This left MLW with four relatively fresh 12-244C engines with no locomotives. CN had some extremely lightly-railed branches in eastern Canada and requested that MLW develop a lightweight locomotive that could allow them to retire the 2-6-0s and 4-6-0s that were still running on these lines, since available off-the-shelf diesels had axle loadings that were too high. MLW started with an end-cab switcher frame and body, placed a pair of Dofasco A1A trucks underneath it, installed the 12-244C and downrated it to 1400hp on account of the lower axle weight, and then placed a small "hood", if it could even be called that, on the other side of the cab to accomodate the electrical cabinet that no longer fit under the long hood on account of the V12 engine. The result was a machine that looked like an RSC-3 that ran into a wall at a high rate of speed. 

The four, #1800-#1801, were assigned near Montreal. The #1802 was wrecked at Point La Garde, Quebec, in May 1969 and subsequently retired. The #1801 was selected for cannibalization in 1975 to keep the last two, #1800 and #1803, in continued operation. By that time, they were running the 67 miles on the Middleton Subdivision between Bridgetown and Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, cutting across that province’s spine. Some of its rail was as light at 56 pounds, which the RSC-24s could accomodate. The units were oddballs on the roster, the last 244-powered locomotives on the vast CN roster by the mid-1970s and CN was already planning for their eventual replacement was already in place, taking the trucks from the RSC-24s, and the earlier 539T-powered RSC-13s, for future conversions of RS-18s RSC-14s to enlarge the light-stepping locomotive fleet for CN’s branchline network.

I had a wedding to attend on Wednesday afternoon, and so I had a free morning and decided to go out to get some photos of NYS&W UT-1. I keep hoping one of these days I'll get lucky when the #3040 comes up lame and they have to borrow an MA&N Alco, but today was not that day.

Pulling out onto Schuyler Street and passing by the old DL&W crossing guard tower. This tower actually dated back to the canal days and was relocated, and mounted on this tower, by the DL&W in 1952. Amazingly, this tower was in use until 1987, when the NYS&W finally automated all the crossing gates along this stretch of street-running. The NRHS chapter bought it and has restored and preserved it.

Having hopped off the DL&W line and onto ex-West Shore tracks, UT-1 prepares to cross French Road at road level and then pass underneath the North South Arterial Highway. In the foreground, the track headed to the left is a continuation of the old New York, West Shore & Buffalo and heads north to New York Mills, while the line to the right is NYO&W tracks and heads southwest to Ontario Ave, where it stub-ends and then the train will reverse down the old New Hartford Industrial Switch. Yes, that's some pretty wavy rail, but it's fairly light traffic and they're doing 10mph, maybe. There originally would have been a diamond here, with the NYO&W continuing off to the left, but in 1971 the EL and PC implemented an agreement whereby PC would tear out all the ex-West Shore through the city, and the multiple crossings from East Utica, and would utilize the Erie-Lackawanna Schuyler Street trackage south to the E-L/West Shore diamond and then cut over on a turnout so PC could access the New York Mills business. It also allowed Erie-Lackawanna to abandon their ex-NYO&W trackage from Canal Branch under Burrstone Bridge to the O&W/West Shore diamond past the GE French Road plant by utilizing a short distance of the West Shore.

Someone else's map of this somewhat confusing situation.

At the French Road runaround, they dropped off the three covered hoppers behind the extended-heigh boxcar. I figured the boxcar was headed to Oneida Warehouse, while the three covered hoppers at the rear were going to one of the feed mills down in Sangerfield. I had set up down the NYO&W track only to watch them head down the West Shore line to New York Mills, which is not a section I'm terribly familiar with.

So, this is where the line crosses Burrstone Road, with McCraith Beverage off to the left. McCraith is an occasional customer of the NYS&W, but they weren't stopping there today.

SCI Plywood is a customer but NYSW wasn't exchanging any cars there today, instead working the Fountainhead Group farther down, where they cut off the boxcar and swapped out an empty covered hopper for a loaded one. Fountainhead Group makes backpack spray rigs for lawn, agriculture and firefighting purposes, so I would be that those covered hoppers are carrying plastic pellets.

Then they left the boxcar and covered hopper by Fountainhead and ran light to the end of the line to grab an empty end-bunk flatcar from Di Highway Sign & Structure. They assemble the poles for highway signs and traffic lights, and I remember going there with my grandfather to deliver timbers for stacking finished product on. He always referred to Di as "the Cancer Pit" because Hubbell Galvanizing is on the same property, and galvanizes a lot of the posts for the signs, and the big factory building for the galvanizing process is all rusted and discolored from the fumes. Go by on cold or rainy days and you would see clouds of yellow steam rolling out of the place. Nightmarish stuff.

With no runaround track anywhere on the New York Mills Industrial Switch, they were forced to run back shoving a boxcar and a covered hopper on the rear with the flatcar in tow on the front. And, yes, that's a stone NYC/West Shore whistle post to the left. They would drop the center bunk flat car off before the switch back to the NYO&W line before heading over to work the New Hartford end. There would have been a switch here, with the line that the #3040 is on only being a spur down to New York Mills, while the West Shore main to Buffalo would have continued about parallel to the road.

Back on the NYO&W and heading over Sauquoit Creek. I can't imagine that there are too many NYO&W bridges that see active rail service any more. 

Having dropped off the boxcar before making the switch over to the New Hartford Industrial Switch, the #3040 now reverses down towards Oneida Warehouse. I would say that Oneida Warehouse is probably the most steady customer for the NYSW Utica Branch. It's almost a guarantee that four or five days a week, even if they don't service any other customers, they are going over to Oneida Warehouse to switch boxcars.