Red Barn

nobody@ipernity.com (Joel Dinda) — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:49:57 +0000

Yeah, I'm a reformed railfan. Sometimes it shows....

Same train as yesterday's photograph, again by Clara's restaurant in downtown Lansing. Interesting power consist, if you care about those things.

Canadian Pacific 9006 is an SD40F--which means it had a wide cab, a wide body, and a "Draper taper" behind that wide cab so the crew could see back. These were built by GMD and designed for the CN, as I recall; CP bought a few. Not exactly a failed experiment, I gather, but neither railroad bought a lot of 'em. The "Red Barn" moniker, as you can see, is descriptive; the look's pretty distinctive. That bell over the windshield is a nice touch.

Seeing a lot of unusual locomotives this year. That generally means that traffic levels are high, so they're digging out the mothball fleet---but I'm no longer following railroad news very closely, so that's speculation. Last time I saw so many unusual locos was the early nineties, when these guys were part of the "new" fleet and were thought of as huge. Now they're (relatively) small, and uneconomical.

Rather odd thing: If you Google for CPR 9006, you discover that CP's first diesel locomotive was a converted railcar, also numbered 9006. Not this loco.

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Red Barn