Does anyone know (or speculate) in what year GN ran their last F7’s in the “sky blue” livery?
You mean the last year that BN ran sky blue F7s. The last day GN ran any trains was March 1, 1970. After that date it was Burlington Northern.
No, I actually meant GN, as I presumed that by 1970 no RR was running 20 year old F7 powered freights, but if you know that BN did, that answers my question.
From what I’ve seen on some of my Facebook groups pages there were several class 1 railroads that used F units on freight trains as leaders into the 70s. The Santa Fe Conrail Penn Central and BN. Most of the Santa Fe units became the CF7 line. The Penn Central was using them well because they were already there and they ran and at the time if it could move it was used. The BN was dealing with the problem of getting the Powder River Basin up and running so any and all capital expansion was used there for the most part. The CNW used their fleet extensively in commuter service into the late 70s.
They lasted a surprisingly long time on multiple railroads.
BN ran some F7s into the early 1980s, though they probably all wore Cascade Green by that time.
Canadian National might have been the last Class I to operate F7s, they rebuilt a number of them during the 1970s and some ran until 1989. They could even be found in passenger or mixed train service into the mid-80s, often paired with a steam generator car.
VIA had part of an F7 on the roster until 2011 in the form of the cab on FP9RM 6300 (originally CN 6524), which spent its last years as the Vancouver shop switcher. 6300 was damaged in the infamous 1986 Hinton, Alberta crash, and to repair it VIA purchased a retired F7A from Kansas City Southern which had suffered a major engine room fire (KCS 4062), chopped both units behind the cab and grafted the two good sections together, making one working unit out of two wrecked ones.
Certain other relics (or at least their parts) are still in use, like the load tester at CN’s Edmonton (Walker yard) diesel shop, which is made of two F-unit dynamic brake grids sitting on a Flexcoil truck.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/albertarailwaymuseum/2127718400/
In 1977, BN had two A and two B units for their business train.
I recall seeing them in Chicago in 1977. What I thought at first was that it was one of the E units used then in commuter service, partly behind other vehicles but while the E units had orange and white nose stripes, this loco had green and white stripes. Whan I saw the whole set, they were arranged ABBA on a matching cascade green train. Later that night we were out on the Aurora line, and they ran through at speed, sounding much louder than the usual commuter train.
I recall having one of Strapac’s early Burlington Northern Roster books, and a number of units were illustrated still in blue with “BN” lettering under the number, and although, of course, I can’t find it now, I’m sure there were blue F units still in service, although some may have been F9s…
Peter
I imagine most of the Great Northern F units were in Big Sky Blue on merger day when the Great Northern disappeared into Burlington Northern, including probably the surviving 5 F9B units (The 6th was retired by GN and didn’t make it to the BN roster as a powered locomotive, having been rebuilt as a heater car before the merger).
While unscientific, it’s certainly far more common to see pictures of blue F units in the early Burlington Northern days than it was to see one in the older GN paint scheme. At least a handful managed to make it to the BN roster without the blue and white though.
It didn’t lost long. Excluding early retirements in the opening months, the surviving F units were quickly repainted in Cascade Green. While the active BN roster wasn’t fully repainted until the end of 1976 (no RS3 saw paint until late that year for instance), it’s difficult to find a picture of an active BN F unit in predecessor colors by 1973.
Even most of those strickened in 73 and 74 went to the scrapyard in fresh BN colors, before F unit retirements stopped in 1975 and a rebuild program was initiated with the boom in coal traffic extending their life of the survivors.
What might be confusing things is that the earliest F units, the FTs of 1941-45, generally had all been retired (usually traded in on 2nd generation EMD diesels) by the mid-sixties, so only lasted about 20 years. However, all the later F units (including FPs) often worked much longer than that. As I recall on trips to Canada, F-units were fairly common in the 1970s, and saw Via Rail’s “Canadian” passenger trains with FPs in 1983. The F9s Erie Mining Co. in northeast Minnesota bought in 1954 were still hauling taconite pellets to the ore dock when the taconite operation ceased in the early 2000s.
GN used A-B-A sets of F7s as standard power on iron ore trains right up to (and I suspect beyond) the merger. According to my 1982 Kalmbach “Diesel Locomotive Rosters” book, at that time BN still rostered 2 F3s, 35 F7s, and 72 F9s. Unfortunately it doesn’t break down which railroad originally owned the engines. I don’t know how many were in everyday use, but I believe the former NP F9s were still being used on mainline trains in the early 1980s.
While many post FT examples enjoyed more than 15 years of life, quite a few were retired at that mark or even earlier.
The Burlington’s large fleet of F3’s and their small F7 fleet were virtually extinct by merger day for example (only one F7 was still around). And only the F9 fleet was more or less intact from the various components of BN on the system’s first day (and largely stayed that way until 1980).
The C&NW is the standout example of early retirement of those models with mass retirements of newer F units starting in 1957 when over 30 F3’s were retired and traded-in to EMD on new Geeps, with newer F7’s starting to go the following year in trade. Most FT’s were still active when they were busy trading in F7’s.
BN indeed entered the 80’s with a large fleet of active F units. Approximately 110 were active at the start of the 1980’s from the 284 units rostered on day 1 (out of 730 F units in total originally owned by predecessor roads). That era was ending though when 1982 dawned thanks to the recession accelerating retirement plans.
The last gasp for BN F units in revenue service were 24 mostly ex NP F9’s that remained still active in late 1981 in the Twin Cities region after those in the Pacific Northwest had been parked the year previous.
By the spring of 1982 the last three were drained and stored. Most were quickly sent in trade to GE on cabless Dash 7’s, with only 10 ex NP F9’s (5 A’s and 5 B’s) that were saved as power units for rotaries remaining come 1983. A few remain today at BNSF, paired with rotaries or stored.
What components would GE use from these trade-ins. Trucks are all can think of that might have value to GE.
But weren’t all the trucks on the booster dash-7s FB2s? (I wonder if those A-B-B-B-A sets are still running?). I wouldn’t think GE would want to ‘re-use’ EMD motors, either…
I’m sure nothing of significance was reused. The only obvious component for reuse would’ve been the Blomberg truck frames, but that wasn’t done.
While GE happily constructed new locomotives riding on Blomberg B truck frames for roads like the Seaboard Coast Line, no 4 axle U-Boat or Dash 7 for BN or BN’s predecessors ever sat atop repurposed EMD trucks. Some of BN’s U-Boats reused trucks off traded-in Alco’s and the Frisco B30-7’s rode on trucks from traded-in high-nose U25B’s #800-807, but never an EMD.
All that GE got out of their trade-in allowance to Burlington Northern for those retired F units in the early 1980’s was their scrap value. But accepting them in trade no doubt played a role in helping secure that order for Erie instead of it going to La Grange for new GP50’s (All of BN’s GP50’s utilized recycled Blomberg trucks from trade-ins).
Thank you all for your responses. I had no idea that freight F7’s lasted so long past 1970.
BN received 4 F3B, 3 F3A, 18 F7A, 17 F7B painted in Big Sky Blue.
So 7 out of 18 F3’s and 35 out of 89 F7’s were in Great Northern’s Big Sky Blue on Burlington Northern’s first day. For comparison with a newer model, GN had cycled 1/3rd of the 5 year old U25B’s through the paint shop for Big Sky Blue by the end.
Not as high of a percentage of F units in blue/white as I expected judging by pictures of the early months of Burlington Northern, but perhaps that’s because many of these were early retirements.
Quite a few were retired during 1970-1972, some probably never operating under BN. And if they typically would repaint a unit after overhaul (I’m not sure if GN practiced that, but that’s what many roads do to this day), it makes sense that many of those out running in the early days of BN were those that had been repainted in Big Sky Blue.
Only 2 of the GN’s F3’s stuck around until the end of the F unit era with the rest retired by the end of 1974. And only 25 of the F7’s were retained past those early years.
Were any of the 5 F9B’s that made it to BN painted in Big Sky Blue?
Minor correction to my previous post only 16 F7B units, but one F9B unit also. I mistook 474C for a F7B unit when in fact it was one of five F9B units purchased to turn an A-B-A set into an A-B-B-A set.
Also three Passenger F3 units were painted into Big Sky Blue but did not make it to the BN merger, 1 F3A, and 2 F3B units. In total 183 locomotives were repainted into Big Sky Blue, with the locomotives delivered new in Big Sky Blue, there were 239 locomotives that wore the paint scheme. A significant number considering the scheme first appeared in April 1967, and the merger took place on March 1st, 1970.
Keep in mind GN didn’t start using the Big Sky Blue paintscheme until mid-late 1967. Unlikely they would have repainted an engine that they were about to scrap!
[;)]
One of my happiest memories was chasing an A-B-B-A set of Erie-Lackawanna Fs out of Port Jervis on regular freight – and a fine, fast wheel they put on a good long consist – in what I recall was 1974. That was the last time I saw full F-unit consist on freight, but it wasn’t uncommon to see them MUed in consists in the '70s – I saw one in 1977 in Ohio, with the engine crew gesticulating to draw attention to what they had in the back – and KCS had cabs with the windows plated over to make them boosters that were in general freight consists as least as late as the mid-Eighties and perhaps into the '90s.
CN had those too:
http://tracksidetreasure.blogspot.com/2017/02/cns-blind-mice-f-units.html
A lot of crews in western Alberta and B.C. preferred having an F-unit leading over a spartan cab Geep or SD40. Better visibility and the round nose was better at pushing debris off the track.
Soo Line was a relatively late user of F units; a nice touch was none of the A-units had m.u. connections in the nose, so always had to run on the end of a consist…so in the seventies you might see an F7A-GP9-RS27-F7A lashup, with the Fs facing away from each other.
Then again, the next train might have a GP30-F7B-GP9 lashup, since the B-units could run anywhere in the consist.