Youtube video of AC6000CW being delivered to the Lake Shore Railway Museum on March 17, 2022: Wabtec donates an AC6000CW!

Right on! Is this the newest locomotive currently in a museum?

Neat that it has a steering truck at one end and a standard one at the other.

While I am well into old pharthood - it is sobering to see something 'so new' to be donated to a museum.

Motive power has yet to make a quantum leap beyond the AC6000's or for that matter the AC4400's.

AC's began to populate the Class 1's in the middle 1990's and are approaching 30 years old. Locomotive technology, in the past, has had generational improvements approximately every decade. With the coming of AC traction technology, it seems that technology has now stagnated with only minor detail improvement having been made in the past 30 years.

This is awesome news!!
In the text of the YouTube video, it states that the first 2 CSX AC6000CW's have been set aside for preservation. Does anyone know more about this? Which organizations may expect to get them?
Wes

That could be argued. Each generation of diesel electric locomotives have improvements that many people don’t see/realize. Heck, look at the early SD40-2s to the newest model SD40-2s made in the late 70s. The improvements are vast. Even today companies are coming out with upgraded “kits” and things to adapt old technology.

The newer locomotives, AC locomotives, it is sort of the same situation. However this power is much too big to be used on many short lines that thrive off of “hand-me-downs”. And the Class-1s are pushed heavily by government entities to keep emissions down and efficiency up. I believe that is why you haven’t seen many upgrades itself in other cases.

The other thing to keep in mind is: railcar loading kept increasing. Now it is pretty much maxed out in the current design of 248,000lbs per car. So now the class-1s have adopted PSR and other similar methods to increase profit. Since each individual car can’t haul anymore weight they push the train lengths to be longer and longer. DPUs and PTC are the newest technology to “help” the railroads meet their efficiency and cost goals.

Until the railroads decide they cannot meet demand with current power or legislation they won’t push manufacturers to make any new upgrades. The other thing to keep in mind is that the standard fossil-fuel burning engines are trying to be phased out in many other industries. There’s been several articles on experiments with hydrogen or battery powered locomotives.

I have a feeling this is going to be like the steam to diesel transition period. Until someone gets it figured out, there’s going to be a lot of experiments. Like Baldwin diesels, Alcos, center cab diesels etc. once GE and EMD figured out their methods things slowed down. Just wait until someone figures out the next green method. We will have an explosion of new makes and models.

What a lot of people don’t realize is we are in a transition period. When a lot of the museums we have now where starting, the people who were visiting the museums were taking their kids or grandkids to the museums to show them the trains they grew up with. Now we have a whole new generation or two that grew up sitting trackside. Not watching Steam, heck not even watching SD40s but the new visitors watched these AC locomotives battle tonnage and grades. So that will become a want from this new generation of visitors.

Let’s face it: Museums like the one in Strasburg, PA; Golden, CO; Sacramento, CA; (among others) are supposed to be museums that display the history of rail for the ENTIRE history of the state. Are they missing a period of time? Wake up, the 90s are 30+ years ago. They are history. So are we going to start seeing more of these diesels being preserved. Myself hopes so. However, I doubt anything will ever be like the Strasburg RR or even the Colorado RR Museum. I don’t see these preserved diesels pulling passengers, which is sort of sad. However a lot of parts are already not available. Class-1s and shortlines are having problems getting synthetic gear case lube and baggy filters (supply chain issues).

The other thing is: anything on a steam locomotive can be rebuild. Look at Stathi and the WP&Y 61, he has done things that were previously found to be impossible. However on a diesel if a main gen goes out, or a crankshaft on an engine, you’re pretty much hosed. No volunteer organization will have the dedication or expendable cash to replace and rebuild (doing an engine change out, or main gen swap is no small feat, I know I’ve done a few myself). And that is while parts are available. Good luck when trying to repair a 567, parts are almost impossible to find. Nevada Northern is lucky as they have had so many New Old Stock parts stored away when they took over. That doesn’t happen anymore.

Those are my thoughts. Diesels are becoming museum pieces. Like it or not. I’m excited about it. You should be too. Maybe it’s time for steam to rest. Heck there will be a lot less drama and know it alls!!

Lake Shore Railway Museum has quite the collection of GEs now: they have one of the Ford Motor Company 132-tonners, a South Shore 800-series electric, a U25B, the B32-8 and now an AC6000CW.

While anything on a steam locomotive can be fabricated, lots of stuff on diesels can be cannibalized or stolen. Look no further than Doyle putting a 251 into his PA, or DSNG putting a 251 into the Porter 1203. Not common under steam, sometimes not uncommon at all for diesels.

There's no shortage of diesel 'stuff' that truly hasn't survived over time, Cat GE-44-ton D17000, Cooper Bessemer 600hp blocks of almost all types, etc.

The scary part remains the electronics. Merge a computer and a locomotive and I guarantee you the computer will die first, and nobody will know what's going on in those circuit boards except the guys that designed them. When a maintenance manual just says 'replace the board' you're now in serious trouble. We've hit that with one rather notable locomotive repair that shall remain nameless, but it involved tracking down the retired designer, finding him in another country, and having him make replacement cards in his basement.

I have a good friend/old school CMO that maintains if you can't jumper around it with battery cables or jam a penny into a relay, he really doesn't want to maintain it forever.

In my experience, the electronics are not really that bad. If you have someone that understands the basic principle and can read the circuit diagrams you’re fine. There’s so many Electrical Engineers out there any more that some one that can figure it out and fix a problem. Cards are actually fairly simple. The -3 computers are a pain in the rear end but not impossible to reprogram I would imagine if a proper software engineer was able to experiment.

The filters and other consumable parts are going to be a problem. Yes you can replace engines. But if you can’t get a fire ring or a thrust washer for a 567 then how will you replace a head or power assembly respectively. If the crank goes bad there’s no saving the block. Again, most volunteer organizations do not have the time or money to do an engine or main gen swap. I’ve done it, it takes many hours of labor and a lot of knowing how to align things properly.

Actually the benefit of an EMD and welded crankcases are that you CAN fix the block if it has a crank let go, or puts a rod through the side. I have seen it done. If this is worth doing or not for a museum piece is a different story.

While there are indeed a lot of crossover parts, now is a time for museums to start hoarding 567 (and even 645) parts while they can still get them easily. The newest ones are over 50 years old now, and some things are indeed starting to get rare, such as heads and even power assembly's. Not to mention, some of the "new" parts, are total junk. We just had to do blower drive bushings and thrust washers on a 567C, and the new parts simply did not fit..

I suspect that technology will end up providing solutions to all of these problems at some point. I recall when some things on steam locomotives were thought to be beyond our capabilities. Now they are building new ones from scratch.

Computer gone bad? At some point maybe a Raspberry Pi type unit will have the same capabilities. Think I'm nuts? Your Apple watch can run rings around early space flight systems.

Bad crankshaft? Create a replica on a 3D printer and use that to create a casting mold? I don't think 3D printing will ever reach the strength you'd need, but maybe it could be used to create a pattern and essentially do a giant lost wax casting?

As for the fire rings and thrust washers. I know they're no longer in stock, but is this something that could be machined or custom made? There seems to be a lot of capability out there to create pretty much anything. Of course you might not like the price.

Replacing a crank requires more work than your average car engine. Yes you can weld up the block. But if the crank goes bad it’s worse than a full and patch. The labor alone is astronomical. Locomotives I work on have had several patches and such when a rod when through the block. But a crank gone bad totals the engine.

Sorry but that’s just how it is.

Another example:

It's long been reported/rumored that a crankshaft issue is what sidelined one of the E&LS's two Baldwin Sharks.

They have a dozen or so potential six-cylinder 606 "parts donors" surrounding the shops in Wells, but no 608 eight-cylinder engines.

I'm not sure what the issue supposedly was with the other Shark.

Grounded-out traction motor was what beached the other Shark, I believe. Also one of them had a throttle that was no longer functional, not sure which one. In theory, you could mix-and-match the two to make one operational Shark and make the other a display piece, although I'm sure that's not as easy in real life as it is on paper.

Good afternoon,

It is great that one of these is saved. While not as popular as the AC4400W, they are still worth the preservation. Even better in the town that they are sinonyumous with.

As raised by a number of people, time marches on and already 25+ years have gone by since the first one of the AC GEs, or Wide cab GEs for that matter were built.

Aside from 2 4-axle Dash 8s and this unit, no Dash 8 / Dash 9 / or AC4400W have been saved.

One can only look at the rows of cut up cabs at LTEX in Loardstown OH to understand that the number of Dash-8 6-axle locomotives are diminishing rapidly.

While they are "still new" in many of our visions, time marches on and soon none will be left.

We need only to remuind ourseves, that these generations of diesels, made GE the #1 builder in North America. That does speak volume as to the need to see a few selected examples saved.

For museums who have general mandates - like IRM for example and others, the younger generations will want some day to see an AC4400W or a Dash-8 6-axle saved. Those were the relevant units of their generation. Much like us older people, were happy to see SD40-2s saved, and ever older generations, the F-unit / Geeps.

Len