I guess there isn’t much demand for old 4-axle GEs. No wonder GE’s ES23B rebuild proposal hasn’t gotten anywhere while EMD’s 710ECO is going smooth and steady:) Illinois Railway, formally Illinois Railnet, is an Illinois shortline that runs on former BNSF tracks in La Salle County north of Streator, IL and Kendall County. I wonder if IR still has that CF7 too:) On the plus side IR now has 6 axle SD50s and a SD45T-2, in addition to various 4-axle EMDs.
I’m not at all sure, but I though MM&A were running several older GEs. In fact most of their fleet that I’ve seen is GE. Why didn’t they just sell the units to them I wonder.
Whether MM&A or any other railroad operates similar GE’s or not does not matter, there has to be a market for the locomotives for someone to buy them. Its not a matter of, “we’re retiring them so you have to buy them”. They will not just purchase them for the hell of it.
OmniTrax had no use for non-EMDs with a high failure rate. They were oddball from the word go.
The single digit CF7’s are alive and kicking, now at Grant, NE on another ex-North American RailNet property: NKCR…along with several GP7/GP9m’s of various heritages.
With UP selling off entire classes of 567 and 645 powered units (plus at least one ex-CNW slug of the “BU” era), including almost all of their remaining end-cab switchers…why bother with a cantankerous old GE that has seen better days? The used locomotive market is flooded, EPA rules withstanding, with good rebuilt first and second generation locomotives. (The deadline at Burnham/Denver was huge and several tracks deep for an auction of surplus power here recently)
What I continue to not understand, is certain shortlines running around with BIG SD45’s et al on tiny (less than 90#) rail with bad geometry.
Lighter 6 axle units are a rare breed in the used locomotive market…there certainly were many built in the transition era(RSD-1s, etc), but not many remain…
That’s a pretty cool shot from the top of the bridge. I noticed those engines were gone a few weeks ago and was wondering what happened to them, they’d been sitting on the west side of town with the windows boarded up for quite a while.