Why would you want to ruin a perfectly good B unit? I love B units.

TP&W's B unit was barely 2 years old. The curved nose sheets, windshield castings and other hardware (and probably a good deal of advice) came from EMD.

Interestingly, a B frame is 6.5" shorter than an A. TP&W extended theirs 3". Any more would have risked changing the weight distribution.

REF: Jan 1955 TRAINS.

Hi,

If I recall correctly, Southern Ry was still running the Crescent (pre 1979) when a cement mixer truck did not yield in Duluth, GA.

I stumbled across the damaged 69xx E9 at Peagram and somewhere have a photo of it with a crunched nose.

It took a while to fix it since Southern was trying to get out of passenger service (so I guess it was 1977-8). When it was fixed, they took the nose from an F unit that was being scrapped.

Doug vV

Good (well, not so much for the F) because otherwise we might have seen the south's only Crandall Cab!

Hi,

When this accident happened, Southern (who had not joined Amtrak in 1971) had 15 E9s and everything needed for class 1 passenger service even though it was a money looser. Graham Claytor was out by this time and the mandatory running of passenger trains if you did not join Amtrak had expired.

Each Crescent had a tri-weekly Amtrak passenger car from Amtrak that was Crescent NY to New Orlenes and then the Sunset Limited to LA.

Since Amtrak felt it was an important part of their service, they wanted the Southern route. The first petition for passenger train abandonment was conditioned that Southern talk more with Amtrak. Southern did not want Amtrak to have full access to their entire system like other systems had done in 1971.

Congress finally got involved (I think indirectly - no laws passed but pressure on Amtrak was exerted) and when it looked that the Southern Crescent might be turned over to Amtrak as the Crescent Limited, the wrecked E9 was repaired. Amtrak leased and then purchased almost the entire Southern passenger equipment fleet.

I rode the Cresent the last time under Southern in the spring of 1978 (IIRC) for one more travel under private ownership. Due to college workloads, I was not able to ride again after a one year (?) waiting period was imposed.

In that last trip I was pulled by 12 of the 15 diesels and recorded (somewhere) all the rolling stock numbers.

Lots of fun.

Further history that is a footnote to the end of private passenger service but like the Allution Campaign in Alaska in WWII is not well remembered by many.

Doug vV