Was there any common practice as to locomotives used on M.O.W. equipment? Since such power was not in revenue service, I’ve assumed that they were generally older, well used engines that had outlived their productive life on the mainline. Was that generally the case?
In particular, how was this issue address in the 50’s by a railroad that had phased out steam by, say, '52 but had a diesel fleet generally less that ten years old and still prime for revenue service? Would they hang on to an old puffer belly to haul the M.O.W. equipment around?
Also, if the crane was needed would they have pulled something bigger off the line to do the work?
In the 1950s you wouldn’t have found locomotives regularly assigned to M.O.W. service. That’s a relatively recent development. A railroad that had dieselized by 1952 would have to assign a diesel off its regular roster, most likely a road switcher or even a switcher. If there was steam in standby service then it could be used on a work train, but then the railroad wasn’t completely dieselized, was it?
If a wrecker was being used, for example to do bridge work, that wouldn’t necessarily call for a different locomotive. Wreckers aren’t heavier than, say, a couple of loaded ballast cars, and usually are subject to speed restrictions, so bigger or more locomotives might not be needed.
Work trains are relatively few and far between (1-2% of all trains operated). Having one old engine at one location when you might have a work train in Wichita one day and Chicago the next wouldn’t be very useful. Most small MofW jobs were handled by locals.
If you were going to run a work train you would use whatever power you had handy since it was a train that might run for 2 or 3 days and then there wouldn’t be another work trains for weeks or months. Normally since a typical work train was a small train you wouldn’t need much power. One switcher or road switcher would handle it. Work trains also tend to run for short distances, out and back, so the power will return to its source the same day or week.
I assume by “the crane” you mean the wrecker crane. That’s not a MofW train, that’s run by the mechanical department (MofW is the engineering department). Unless it was cleaning up a wreck or repairing a car off the main track, the wrecker got whatever power was available the fastest. A railroad probably runs 25 to 50 or more engineering trains for every time they run the wrecker.
There have been cases where steam-powered pile drivers had bad-ordered boilers, and a still usable steam engine would get hooked up to it, to move it around and to provide the steam to make it work. This would be a pretty rare instance. Usually they would use whatever engine was available.
Thanks, all. I was kinda hoping to use a couple of pieces of T&P service equipment (wrecker crain and caboose) as a excuse to get an old ten wheeler assigned to this duty after all the others had been sold in the late 40s. I know it didn’t really happen, but I figured I could concoct a pretty good story to explain it.
You know, the Sunset Limited COULD have used the T&P between Abilene and Sierra Blanca on its way to El Paso due to flood related track and bridge outages west of San Antonio! Those do look like storm clouds coming in from the Gulf.[swg]