I just found this YouTube vid and really enjoyed it! It was uploaded in 2015, and starts out very nicely with Union Pacific and Southern Pacific power hauling early Amtrak varnish in the western USA.
HOWEVER the pleasant shocker for me and, I’m sure, “Big Cowl” fans is the many action scenes with SDP40F’s! You can see them starting at time index 10:37. Imho, very nice timing considering that Athearn is in the process of planning/producing an HO-scale SDP40F and Kato is producing the N-scale version.
I had forgotten about the SP units (SDP45’s?) in Amtrak’s service (although I think Amtrak was either leasing them from Southern Pacific or they may have been “pinch hitters”). Union Pacific E’s have always been sweet looking “eye candy”.
Seeing the SDP40Fs in action brought back fond memories of my teen years as my afternoon “hang out” was usually at the train station and SCL’s mainline. I remember how “nomal” it was to see 12 to 18 car length trains, double-headed with the six axle giants. Big contrast to today’s typical 8 to 11 car length Amtrak train hauled by, what I call Genesis “wingless airplanes”.
I enjoyed seeing the big variety of passenger equipment from Pullman Standard, Budd, and ACF. Add to that, there were further variations (window & interior arrangements) due to the railroad owner ancestry of the cars. Then there was also the variety of motive power too. E-units, SDP40Fs, P30CH’s, F40’s, GG1’s E60CP’s and even FL9’s.
No offense to modern-era passenger rail fans, but I think that is likely why today’s Amtrak trains (while efficient and modern) look so generic and bland to me and some of the railfan/modelers of my generation. But I am glad that ridership continues to remain strong. I have used the service and look forward to future rides on Amtrak.
Didn’t those SDP40F’s have a derailing problem? A friend of mine said the units were very heavy, looked more like freighters, and the power trucks had a severe “yawning effect”.
The SDP40F was mechanically reliable but experienced several high speed derailments, causing the railroads over which Amtrak ran to impose speed limits starting in 1976-77. Although the “hollow bolster” truck design was suspected, this was never proved, despite extensive investigation by EMD, Amtrak and the Federal Railroad Administration. It was supposed that the steam generators and water tank may have made the rear of the engine too heavy. Later FRA investigations concluded that the actual culprits were lightweight baggage cars on most trains, which caused harmonic vibrations when placed di
I road on the San Francisco Zephyr as a 16 year old in the mid 1970’s from Sacramento to Denver and on another trip from Osceola Iowa to Sacramento. Both trips the train was pulled by SDP40F’s. Reportedly Athearn is working on producing a model of this iconic but fairly short lived passenger diesel. I am very interested in obtaining a pair; I’ve always wanted models of those engines since the time I took those trips.
Me too Riogrande! I want at least two in the red-nosed scheme and one in Phase 3. I plan on getting them without sound so that I may install Loksound V.4’s in them. For horn schemes I plan on both the Leslie SL4T and Nathan P5a, which were both sweet sounding and melodic horns. BTW: a few SDP40fs did get K5La’s just before they were traded in.
A wonderful engineer that I knew, Randall Hodge pictured below (r.i.p amigo), enjoyed running the SDP’s and preferred them over the F40s.
An Updated Version of the SDP40F with DCC has yet to be released in HO Scale. The only ones that exsist right now are Athearn Blue Box Models and Brass Versions.
There have been brass versions as well as a resin shell produced by KASLO, however, no one has produced a plastic HO RTR SDP40F.
Athearn’s version is a model of the 20 cylinder EMD FP45 in Amtrak’s “Pointless Arrow” scheme. The prototype 16 cylinder SDP40F was based on the EMD SD40-2 platform. Although it has the basic “Cowl” design there are a good number of differences, externally and internally, between the two prototypes.
