ONR’s Northlander into Toronto today had CN SD40 5222 as the
sole power. The train was running about 2 hours late, and had an
EGU and five cars behind the head-end.
Cool, often it has an ONR SD75I. I wonder why they used a CN locomotive?
I’ll have to tell my club’s president who is a member of the ONR society.
I didn’t know CN had power to spare.
Over in my parts they are running any kind of power they can get their hands on.
Lots of leased power.
They don’t have power to spare! However, the Northlander is the only way in or out of a few places way up there, and it pretty well has to run with something… sounds to me as though the ONR units availble had problems, and they found something which was running and hooked it up and went! Junctionfan, any ideas?
As anyone familier with ONR operations will know, normal motive power
on the Northlander in recent years is a GP38-2.
ONR’s SD75i locomotives do NOT power the Northlander (although they
can be seen occasionally on CN freight trains in southern Ontario on HPH).
No I stumped. I think I have heard something from a few people in my club but it was when I was working on the bench work so my mind was elsewhere. There is at least 3 people there who will be able to answer the reason. Our president is part of an ONR group/ society and is quite an ONR nut so when our club meets tomarrow for the Christmas party, I’ll ask him.
The only thing I can think of is that CN has used some of the ONR locomotives in the past and the ONR wants some of CN’s to make up in hours CN took from the ONR-pool power.
That makes sense, especially if ONR’s SD75i locomotives have been working on CN freight trains, then obviously CN does owe ONR some power time.
They borrow everything from their SD75s to the SD40s and their GPs. Sometimes I think the ONR was bought secretly.
Had confirmation that the ONR GP38 crapped out on them so they were borrowing 5222 for a while until they could fix it.