Questions about Delaware Lackawanna Railroad

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

This is one of my favorite roads…primarly because they run those beautiful Alcos and MLW locomotives. But from a business perspective, why would a railroad purchase such old locomotives from a builder who has been gone for 40 years? Are these engines that cheap and easy to work on? Parts must be hard to find… and keeping those engines out of the environmental spotlight must be tough…

And some of those bigger locomotives like the M636s were problematic for their prior class 1 owners… Why buy old power with a history of problems?

Don’t get me wrong…as a railfan I appreciate the DL and other roads like the Ottawa Central that prefer the old Alco power. However from a business perspective wouldn’t a fleet of GP38-2s make more sense? Maybe the owners of DL are railfans themselves…

2

My guess is that the initial purchase price is quite low, but because some parts are getting harder and harder to find maintainance costs will be higher.

3

I’m equally interested to know myself. I noticed the same thing when I went to Scranton and the Poconos August of last year, lots of active duty Alcos. In fact, Alcos were pretty much all I saw when I was there.

I’ll bet Larry knows and will sound in tonight sometime [;)].

4

There was an article about GVT (D-L’s parent) in RailPace several years ago. There are several reasons for them being all Alco…Alcos are cheap. GVT has a massive parts inventory. Alco’s pull like crazy. And GVT’s shop forces are Alco experts.

Nick