I produce yearly train calendars! I am finalizing September’s description about SP AC4400CW locomotives! Can anyone help? Would like the source provided. Is the following info correct?[bow]
“These SP units were part of an order for 279 new 4,400 horsepower units in 1995, their largest order. They were built by General Electric and were Southern Pacific Railroad’s last purchase before merging with UP on September, 11, 1996.”
Robert Jackson
According to Strapac, SP Diesel Locomotive Compendium Volume 2, SP leased 279 AC4400CW from GE Credit Corporation with an option to buy. These were numbered 100 to 378.
Peter
Peter, did SP later purchase these AC4400CW locomotives? UP still has them running now.
Thanx!
Robert Jackson
While I don’t know the details of the lease, since the locomotives were just over a year old when UP took over, I’d assume that UP initially just took over the lease payments and they may or may not have taken up the purchase option when it became available.
While all 279 locomotives went to UP, not all of them survived to get the final UP numbers.
I looked these details up because I found some 1996 photos including the AC4400s in SP grey. At the time SP was flat stony broke and it showed. SP had many locomotives on short term lease, including (I think) all of EMD’s small lease fleet of SD70Ms. I saw three of those on one train… So they probably didn’t have the money to buy anything, let alone 279 AC4400s.
Peter
I suspect the answer lies in whether SP could work out an equipment trust vs. tax consequences of leasing in that timeframe. They certainly had very little money of their own, and I can still remember the first pair of these, perhaps on their maiden trip, that I saw turning south to run down into Shreveport. (As I recall, they stayed fairly glossy and well-kept the whole time I watched them, and in fact I saw one still clearly recognizable in mostly-bloody-nose paint (only a UP cab patch) a couple of months ago. My guess is that UP exercised an option to purchase when lease payments went ‘upside down’ with depreciated value – and surely any of those locomotives is fully depreciated by now.
Incidentally, in the more-lives-than-a-cat-paint-scheme department, once again last night I saw completely unpatched ‘death star’ IC SD70 1019 in service – on the ex-Southern line through what was formerly called Forrest Yard. There are at least four of them in that service, plus one that is patched on the nose and one recently repainted into full CN colors following a long-hood fire.