I dug out John Kirkland’s excellent book “The Diesel Builders - Volume III, Baldwin Locomotive Works” and sure enough on page 139 there’s a photo of SAL 4500 operating in MU with a pair of EMD FT units – the set is A-B-A with 4500 leading 4108 and 4014. The date is not given; the photo is credited as being from Kirkland’s collection.
Further searching turned up a curious item, repeated numerously on e-Bay which is a post card that shows 4501 coupled ahead of ALCO-GE road switchers. Can’t say if these are just coupled sitting somewhere (dead steamers appear to be alongside) or if this is a working lashup, but it is of interest to our discussion here. I don’t know what the policy here is for posting eBay links, but this post card is not hard to find.
Of even further interest is the fact that I turned up a photo or two of one of the SAL’s 1500 HP BLW A1A-A1A units (2700 class) with a 27 point MU jumper on its nose, beside its headlight. Look here:
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2384855
This, taken together, would have standardized the SAL’s Baldwin fleet, since all of the RS-12 units were built with electric throttle.
Getting back to prices for options briefly…
Kirkland (in the same book) gives the price for dynamic brake on a Centipede as being $19,000. At that time, the price of one unit complete in standard condition was $287,250 (same book.) I include this for interest, to see how much this added to unit cost. Would the cost to add dynamic brake to a DR-4-4-1500/1 unit have been $9500? That would be a logical guess, but a guess only… perhaps decent for ballpark discussions but not quotable for history.
I don’t have any price breakdowns for other options on that model. I do have price breakdown for AS-16 units in 1953 in a proposal (obviously never carried out) from B