Does any on know whats up with this F40PH? What’s with the garage door looking thing. I want to model this.
That’s an old F40PH that has been retired from locomotive service and had its prime mover removed. It has been converted into a cab-car/baggage-car (hence the ‘garage door’) and is affectionately referred to as a “cabbage” (cab-baggage).
Does that mean there was a “garage door” on both sides? And Does any one have a builders picture? It looks as if the radiator grilles have been covered up too. I wonder what other extremeties have been changed.
Yes, there are doors on both sides if I remember right.
These F40s are called "NPCU"s, or “Non-Powered Control Unit”. It’s basically a baggage car with cab controls at one end. On short distance trains, these cars can be placed on the end of a train so the engineer just has to switch cabs during the “push” home. And, there’s no need for a baggage car when you have one of these, it’s all built in!
There are lots of photos of these units on www.railpictures.net. Just type in “NPCU” in the search box and you’ll get lots of results.
Amtrak 90200 [:D]
I was looking through some of my photos from last year (the ones I haven’t done anything with) and noticed that a few of these, especially 90368, are awfully dirty on the nose! They should really wa***hem once in a while [swg]… 90219 looks to have received a new “Phase III” paint job, and there’s another thread around here someplace about another “cabbage” painted in the “Acela” scheme.
Maybe Amtrak’s not as boring as I think! [:P]
These ‘cabbages’ were created to handle baggage, but more importantly this was done to give the train crew much-needed protection in the event of a collision with a motor vehicle.
The engineers used to sit in the end of a coach that had a set of controls (vaguely similar to the cab-cars of Metra). The problem was that the engineer’s seat was at the same height above the ground as the passenger seats, which is not where you want to be if you strike a truck or bus.
The ‘cabbage’ is always located on the front of the inbound-to-the-main-terminal end of the train, so as to lessen the noise level in the depot. For example, on the Chicago-Milwaukee trains the ‘cabbage’ is always on the south end of the train.