Wow!
Ditto. Great job of planning and execution. Could not have done that faster . . . or sweeter!!

But, but, but.... this is the end! K-4! back forty! NS used the wrong blue! saw it on Trainorders! Steamtown!

And for the truckers who "got 'er done"--my mental juke box cranked up, "East bound and down, loaded up and truckin'/got a long way to go and a short time to do it/keep those railroad wheelsets movin' on." As to why it appears that nobody got photos of something as unusual as a set of steam locomotive drivers on a big rig--I would assume that they were covered by tarps or even crates. "Mercy sakes alive, good buddy, where you goin' with them steam-train wheels?"

I suppose a certain amount of pessimism is to be expected in a field where so much disappointment has darkened our history. Just last week, Trainorders.com had an inquiry about "Who was Dick Jensen?" Then there are the photos of Pacific Electric 1200-class cars being scrapped in the early 1950's, New York Central's anti-preservation policy, the sad fate of the last San Francisco Muni Type-L car, etc, etc. That said, there's still a lot more steam activity than one would expect over fifty years since steam engines were a significant part of American railroad operations, trolley cars have made a comeback, and even early diesels have been restored to near-new condition.

As sportscaster Jim Hill used to say, "Keep the faith."

Truly! Great job UP and all of the subcontractors involved!

Ironically, the steam locomotive is back together and operational, but some code jockey (like myself) is probably still muddling though the embedded code on the SD70ACe trying to see what the heck happened....

To update an old adage for this situation: "With a steam locomotive, it takes 5 minutes to find the problem and 2 weeks to fix it, with a diesel locomotive, it takes 2 weeks to find the problem and 5 minutes to fix it". :-)

I would guess that EMD Customer Engineering has been consulted on this issue. Software and documentation is not normally shared with the customer-except for the purpose of uploading existing or revised software to the computer (EM2000, EMDEC or ?) in question.

It will be interesting to see if the problem can be duplicated in the shop

DPK

BTW-The diesel shoul'dve been isolated when the problem of not throttling down to idle/unloading was first recognized.

Part of this is also the substantial difference between someone that's doing this for the first or second time versus a pro outfit. (And also, thus, the reason for the three-tier pricing scale for Strasburg's shop: "We need it yesterday/we need it as soon as reasonably possible/whenever you can get around to it", though I suspect the latter may have fallen off the table by now....)

And yes, I'm amazed at how fast the truckers hustled, though to be fair I was mentally thinking a week or so rather than two weeks.

I've had a "first hand" experience with a SD70ACe not responding to throttle command. It was a trailing unit of a DP Remote consist. The two other engines dropped to idle when train was stopped, while the SD70 stayed in Run 6. Burned half way through the rail! Download of the computer showed ithe wheels reach a speed of 83 mph, but the overspeed set for 73 mph did not trip the PCS.

I had an ACE last month that wouldn't respond to MU brake commands after it shut itself down and started itself back up. I didn't know this either until we started pulling and got a couple miles down the road when I looked back and saw smoke bellowing. I had no idea that the computer overrides the mu brake commands. I wish the railroads would get back to building engines to let us be engineers. Sadly, they are going the opposite direction. GE's Trip Optimizer is going online every where. This is basically auto pilot. I also see some people getting killed because of it.

Joe

Union Pacific Steam Engine 844 just went past my office, pulling into Davidson Yard in Fort Worth.

Quite a lashup. 844 and the E8s

.

Boy, I can only imagine what the bill for that was.

"Boy, I can only imagine what the bill for that was."

As the saying goes, "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

"Fast, cheap, good. Pick any two". This one looks like "fast" and "good".

I'm still amazed the whole thing was done in 2 weeks.

Howard P.

Here is an amusingly meaningless question: Which drivers went to which facility?

Steve