https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... etirement/

Here is a more complete story, it looks like it won't just be these old SD-7/9s but 88 total G&W units that will need to be disabled: https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/g ... ettlement/

Here is the EPA "consent decree": https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-relea ... 6/download

There are some ex-Rock Island GP40s that are used every day on the W&P/ ex-SP Tillamook line near me that seem to run perfectly, too bad they can't be donated to say, IRM, if they will be part of the 88.

Those are not on the list.

The list is on pages 44 and 45 of the document (Appendix A).

Interesting. A lot of second generation diesels on the list, including a few remanufactured SD45s/SD40M-2s, rebuilt by MK in the mid-1990s. Seems like the EPA wants G&W to buy new units.

Earlier thread:
G&W to destroy 88 locomotives as part of settlement with EPA

Interesting to me are the ex-Monongahela Super 7s (B23-7S) are on the list. Only 17 were built, MGA owned 11 new. OHCR has 7 of them and PW has 1.

I wonder who selected these units, in terms of emissions I believe there are (or were recently) some super heavy 2-cycle, 20-cylinder ballasted ex-SP SD45T-2s on the G&W roster that are probably the worst. It could be that G&W claimed benefits for the rebuilt units like the Super 7s and SD40M-2s that weren't real, and the EPA punished them for that by ordering them taken out of service.

My pure opinion is that this goes back to the records kept on rebuilding on any given smaller shortline that G&W acquired. And there were a lot of them.

It's all about the paperwork. A lot of Class 3's didn't appear to bother because they didn't need to, but now that G&W is big enough to have over 500 employees, in the eyes of the FRA/EPA they are a 'big railroad', and 'big railroads' follow big rules like Class 1's including Tier provisions.

You'll note that G&W has a lot of old EMD's that were NOT hammered, there's nothing on there that I found for all of B&P. They've been around long enough to know the rules and document everything on rebuilds. We're got a lot of old GP40's floating around in good shape, a lot of GP38-2's One of the last GP35's, ex-ALY 306, is now road slug 102 paired with 3102.

This appears to be one of the traps when a 'big railroad' buys a little railroad and falls under the big railroad rules and has older power.

I've got a client that made a formal inquiry to see if the units could be accepted for museum donation if the prime movers were disabled, and got an affirmative. Usually that means blowing a cat-sized hole through the block.

You know, there's something really interesting to preserving one of these WITH the cat sized hole in it.

The purpose of preserving history is for people to learn from it.

In this case, seeing one of these with a giant hole in the block will hopefully teach future railroaders about the importance of record keeping and regulatory compliance.

Question:

I have been told that recent automotive "cash for clunkers" programs, when properly administered, targeted the most egregious offenders--to the extent that one of the cars being bought and shredded put out on the order of 100 times the pollution of any newer car. (Having personally wrangled with older versus newer anti-smog technology on the identical car model and engine a few years apart, and seen the emissions tests of failing versus passing cars, I don't even want to think how bad the emissions must be from some old 1950s-1970s models. And the joke has become that people who try to commit suicide with car exhaust carbon monoxide with newer cars routinely fail....... I was told of someone who took half an hour just to euthanize an ill chicken under a laundry basket!)

Has anyone actually produced emissions testing or results from older EMD, GE, etc. models to give actual data? Or are we just running numbers and presuming? It would be interesting to actually compare "honorary steam locomotive" Alcos with the more modern stuff coming out of GE and Progress Rail--or even just older GE U-Boats against EMD 567s.............

There was test data on many older EMD products. In cases where it was not required for railroad service, it was sometimes done for equivalent engines in power generating service due to government requirements. The question is whether they can find it now.

The last time I heard of anyone wanting to actually test emissions on an original configuration early 567 engine was a power company in the 1990s. That was thirty years ago, on engines that were (then) 50 years old.

PC

Make the holes big enough so visitors can see into the machinery. EMD produced dozens of fascinating trade show displays with cutaway engines and components. Somebody actually wrote a long article about sales promotion displays in R&LHS Railroad History a few years back. "Selling the Diesel" it was called. Issue #213, Fall-Winter 2015, 18 pages, still available from R&LHS.

Here's an idea for some railroad museum: Cut the center out of a Diesel engine and put a walkway so visitors can walk through it from side to side. Has anybody ever done that before? Well yes, actually somebody has. But it is still an interesting display concept.

PC