I was wondering if anyone had information on these:
I was driving on I-794 yesterday (6-27-06) just south of the Hoan bridge and I caught a glimpse of an Alco switcher (I think it was an S2) sitting on a yard track near the Port Of Milwaukee. It was yellow bodied, with a black underframe and trucks. This is the one I’m most interested in as my grandfather worked at Alco for over 30 years and I’ve been an Alco fan since birth.
This past Sunday (6-25-06) at about 10 at night I saw a Milwaukee Road bandit MP15 roll through Wauwatosa Wisconsin sandwiched between CP AC4400s heading out of town. I didn’t know Milwaukee had MP15s I thought that the road wouldn’t have had the ca***o buy new engines that close to their being bought.
Last year at 35th and Capitol Drive, near the old AO Smith plant, there was a SW1500 marked for Crete Grain, it was a really snappy royal blue and aluminum silver paint scheme and looked as though it had been reciently painted. It worked the yard there for a couple months before dissapearing.
If anyone’s got anything on any of these, it’d be much appreciated, also if anyone else has had a odd sightings lately around the city drop a line, I just got a new digital camera I’ve been dying to get some good shots on.
The Milwaukee acquired 64 MP15AC locomotives on a 15 year lease, these passed to the Soo Line. The Soo Line let half of them go back to the lessor at the end of the lease and kept the other 32. The returned batch were sold by the lessor to Union Pacific.
Was there any manufacturing plant in the area that made:
automobile frames
hot water heaters
farm silos
[?] That’s what AO Smith made. The auto frame business was sold to Tower Automotive, and is now mostly in Mexico [V], I don’t know about the other manufacturing operations.
The Alco belongs to the grain elevator, formerly Continental Grain, but I can’t remember what it’s called right now. I’ll ask a friend who has gone for a ride on it for more information!
Yep, MILW had MP15s. It’s amazing what you can get when you don’t actually “buy” the engines. They were financed through an outside company and leased to the railroad, a common practice for railroads.
I’m sorry I missed the SW!!! I travel through that area regularly, and have seen some interesting sights, including an ILSX locomotive. It is possible that WSOR’s Horicon paint shop had done the painting, but it would be unusual for the unit to stick around for a couple months…
What kind of camera did you get? Shoot me an e-mail, and we could probably arrange a partial day of “camera testing” [;)]
Haha wow so there’s been an Alco switcher in Milwaukee and I never saw it before, crazy. I really need to get some shots of that sometime.
The Crete Grain switcher looked like the kind of work that the Horicon shops do, it was a very smart paint scheme and used quite bright colors. Anyways I found a picture of it here: http://64.246.11.82/images/c/CRETE_GRAIN_A.jpg.11287.jpg
It’s actually a MP15AC. The photo here is of it rolling through La Crosse Wisconsin. Crete Grain is a private elevator in Oakes ND, according to google haha. I still have no idea what that engine was doing in Milwaukee.
I got a Sony CyberShot, with quite a nice memory card. I figured it’d be time to upgrade to digital from my thirty year old Pentax K1000, not that I’m ever going to let that go though. I’d be up for some camera testing, sounds good
