Has any manufacturer or railroad made an all in one unit, a locomotive with room at one end for freight without having to pull a separate car?
Sounds like an interurban box motor or an all baggage RDC.
- Erik
Thank You.
Seaboard has a half an E-unit with a shovel nose and a baggage compartment that lasted into SCL days and was used in Tampa - Bradenton service, including handling equipment off the West Coast Champion.
The Fonda Johnstown and Gloversville had an all-freight gas-electric car that replaced the express service formerly supplied by interuban freight cars after de-electrificaiton.
Almost EVERY interurban line had freight baggage motors that both carried frieght inside themselves and also hauled trailers and also in many cases steam-road freightcars. Indiana Railroad being a good example. Most of the steam-road freight cars its “box-motors” cauled were hopper cars loaded for power plants that supplied electricity to communities in addition to the railroad.
A few years ago in Germany a couple of companies built “Cargo Sprinters” which were container flat cars with a cab at one end and diesel engines fitted under the floor, like those in an RDC. They could carry two twenty feet containers each.
A few are in use in England in conjunction with track maintenance trains.
One pair was tested in Australia but is now used as a terminal switcher.
M636C
Oh yes indeed! Go back over old TRAINS magazines and read the history books on many railroads, especially the Granger roads (roads serving the midwest wheat belt and praries) and far western roads, rural southern roads, and, as noted frequently here, interurban electric railroads.
The “cabbages” (old F40PH with motors removed, used as a control unit) on Amtrak commuter trains (90xxx series) use the empty engine room for baggage.
Rio Grande Southern Goose #2 (circa 1931)
I seem to remember the Rock Island having a locomotive in which one of the prime movers was removed, and the space given to a baggage compartment. IIRC, it was an early-model EMD passenger locomotive.
You’re thinking of RI 750-751, the AB6’s. They were built with only one prime mover and a baggage compartment where the second prime mover would be. Their initial assignment was on the “Rocky Mountain Rocket”, where they would handle one section of the train when it was split at Limon, CO. A second prime mover was later added. In the mid-1960’s, the steam generator was replaced with an HEP unit and the locomotives were assigned to Chicago commuter service.