UP 1111 is reportedly at West Colton Yard, by the Administration Building in Bloomington (CA) right now (Thursday, August 1, 2019), apparently on display until August 3, unknown time. It is also unknown if the public can get near the unit. The last time K.P. was on Slover Ave. (the road to the access road), there were ‘No Trespassing’ signs at the yard entrance. It is also unknown if the unit is visible from the Cedar Ave. overpass (the admin building is to the east a few blocks).
I just happened to visit my old boss and he told me about UP 1111 from a very reliable source. Hopefully, this will be authorized for posting in a timely manner and will be of value to the forum.
I knew they did this unit up, but I never paid attention that it had the special number. To be honest, many within and without (railfans) have a cynical view of the railroad doing this unit up when they’re trying to eliminate has many employees in all departments as they can.
As I recall we had a thread about it when it was first being painted.
It appears that the unit is preferentially used for public (and internal ‘morale-boosting’) appearances and displays – it was at Global II just before the July 4th holiday – and presumably ‘works its passage’ in some regular service when transiting between pre-scheduled appearances. This should be relatively easy to follow by tracking ‘sightings’ on heritageunits.com.
I do have to confess: I was tempted to put out an April Fool’s Day story that UP, unsatisfied by only showing their employees were “Number One” four times, was going to take advantage of padding out the number of available spaces for locomotive numbers in UMLER so more 1s could be painted on there.
I do wonder, modestly, whether grade-crossing compliance would be enhanced and general trespassing would be reduced if the “victims” were mandatorily utilized for fuel generation as part of the legal response to the incidents?..
I would certainly be in favor of using that method to reduce the number of rock-throwers and the lets-place-debris-on-the-tracks-and-see-what-happens scumsuckers.
I’m not misquoting him, I’m punning by putting them ‘on the inside’ (as in ‘you are what you eat’ as it were). To keep the idea of ‘powered by those nourishing people’ going…
I could probably sing quite a bit of the campaign song still … if I weren’t as solicitous as I am about your health and well-being; you wouldn’t be as lief to accuse me of revisionism then.
This thread was started with good intentions, for the benefit of those who wished to see new things, like the recently repainted and renumbered UP 1111. And, I think TRAINS Magazine published photos of UP 1111 with the same objective. But, UP employees and railroaders overall seem to perceive it differently … Which unwittingly puts this thread and Kalmbach’s efforts into an unfortunate political arena.
Myself, I think UP 1111 has the stupidest paint scheme UP has ever concocted and come up with, and totally unprofessional. I also somehow envision Precision Scheduled Railroading provoking a degree of reregulation of the rail industry. If you are old enough to remember Penn Central and Eastern Airlines, you have reason to sense the rail industry is showing signs of going down those routes with one-sided thinking.
TRAINS Magazine in the future may be reporting undesirable new things that we have never imagined. THAT is what I now perceive from reading the replies to this thread, and the casual observer may sense that too …However, the thing to watch may be something very unrelated to paint schemes and Precision Scheduled Railroading, the continuing downward slide in car loadings, that some believe have been inspired by the current trade war / tariffs environment. Unfortunately, the super brilliant CEO’s that are now guiding the railroads have little experience in dealing with total polarizations and those uninterested in peace and unity, and THREE way polarizations are impossible, which brings the above reference to Penn Central and Eastern Airlines to life!
When EMD gave birth to the NS 1111, they used a weird number font (to be fair, all the NS number fonts are weird to me), and the ones were all squished together so it looked like a little barcode on the cab.
|||| ← like that
Hence the “barcode unit” was born and became a thing to certain railfan groups. I guess UP just decided to leech off of that infamy?