i am just wondering what locos do what jobs on any railway. like do f units haul freight or just passengers and are there dedicated yard locos or do all locos work in the yard?
The short answer:
Yes, there were some locomotives designed for passenger work only, some designed for yard work only, and some designed for freight work only. Then there were dual-service locomotives that could do passenger or freight duties. Which types of locomotives were used for which depends on which era you’re modelling - for example, older mainline diesels might be relegated to yard duties when they were replaced by more powerful models.
The long answer:
The answer to your question varies if we’re talking about steam or diesel locos. Steam locomotives were usually designed for a specific purpose, and certain elements of the design - leading and trailing trucks, number and diameter of driving wheels, size of cylinders, etc. were used for a specific purpose.
For example, yard steamers didn’t have any leading or trailing trucks, so that their entire weight would be on the driving wheels to increase the tractive effort. The driving wheels on a yard steamer would also be smaller than that on a road (freight or passenger) locomotive, to increase the torque. This is due to the fact that a switcher has lots of starts and stops at slow speed. A passenger steamer, on the other hand, would have a four-wheel leading truck to provide a smoother lead into curves, large driving wheels for a higher speed, and a four-wheel trailing truck to support a large firebox. A freight/dual-service steamer would have 2 or 4 wheels on the leading or trailing trucks, depending on duties, and wheels larger than a switcher but smaller than a passenger steamer.
With diesels, it’s mainly a difference between gearing and fittings. Early diesels (transition era), had to be equipped with steam generators for passenger work, to heat and provide power to the cars. Hence, diesels with higher-speed gearing and steam generators were used for passenger service, but could be re-geared to freight. Also, they only usually needed one steam generator for the wh
my road freight power is usually 2 or 3 high nose geeps from a pool of 14 similar engines.
i try to assign power similar to prototype practice from my experience.
yard jobs are more diverse. drill job usually gets a Kato NW-2. since it has the muscle and traction to do that job well. utility job that switches cab track and other miscl. duties rates a little SW-1 or SW-8. interchange delivery jobs and transfers use a pair of SW-9’s or Alco RS-2’s. remote industrial switching districts use a SW-8 or 9. all yard power rotates out after 2 shifts and goes to the engine house for 8 hours. this practice lets me justify about 10 locomotives to do the job of 6.
i keep an 0-8-0, a 0-10-0 and a 2-8-2 with footboard pilot and clear vision tender hot for protection power. sometimes i pull a geep out of the road power pool for drill or transfer work.
passenger trains are always a pair of E-8’s with a boiler equipped geep for the local.
you can do something similar on a larger or smaller scale depending on the size of your layout and number of people at your operating sessions. it is really just a mind game but it makes the operation more interesting and fun.
grizlump
The first diesel locomotives to come into common use in the 1930’s were switchers with two two-axle trucks, and passenger engines with two three-axle trucks (usually with the center truck an unpowered “idler”). The F series, introduced with the FT in 1939-40 by GM, was an attempt to basically adapt their E-series passenger diesels to be road freight engines, by using a basically similar but shorter body style and two two-axle trucks.
However from the beginning FTs could be purchased with steam boilers in the B units for passenger service, and by the end of the 1940’s many railroads in mountainous territory had found that the F unit worked better on grades than E units, so bought many Fs geared for passenger use.
Alco’s RS-1 is generally considered the first mass-produced “road switcher”, although GM had made a few similar units for GM a little earlier. Basically they were switchers that were “stretched” to add a section behind the cab. They could be ordered with boilers for passenger use, or could work hauling freight trains or switching in yards.
Unlike steam engines, diesels can be put together electrically in a “multiple unit” (“m.u.”) configuration, and all controlled from one control stand by one engineer. That allowed railroads to buy medium (1500-2000 HP) engines and use them as building blocks for trains…if you needed more power to haul a train, a you didn’t have to go get a bigger steam engine, you just added another diesel unit.
Although steam engines were generally designed for specific jobs, usually easy to spot by looking at their front wheels (no front truck meant it was a switcher, a two-wheel lead truck meant it was a freight engine, and four-wheel lead trucks were generally used on passenger engines) and drivers (small drivers for switchers, medium drivers for freight, large drivers for passenger engines), real railroads weren’t as fussy about what engine did what job
thanks i have a small l shaped layout and have mostly freight cars for operating and it is usally just me and my son using it. i do plan on getting some passenger service and have started on making the layout bigger with a shelf extending off one end and going the length of the wall it will more or less double the layout. and i just upgraded to dcc. i am going with current era in the buffalo ny area seeing as thats where i live and the scenery is out my window but would like to get a steam engine cause its just cool to see that type of engine rolling down a line. other wise i am going with diesel. i have a sd40-2 and a sd38 so far. the train expo is tomorrow and i hope to find some good deals there.
let you know what i get
In the early stages of dieselization (say up to around the mid-twentieth century) “A” units of the F and E and similar series locomotives didn’t have MU hoses on their fronts. Also early roadswitchers and especially the early switchers often didn’t have MU hoses. The mindset then was that locomotives were single units, with A-B and A-B-B-A sets being a single locomotive, and roadswitchers and switchers replacing steam locomotives on a one-to-one basis.
Mark
Engines are also often re-assigned. Canadian Pacific transferred FP9s back and forth between freight and passenger service. They also had RS10s and GP9s with steam lines and boilers.
Some smaller railroads did not have any units that were dedicated to a particular service. The Algoma Central for example dieselized in 1952 with a pair of SW8s for yard duty and 21 GP7s - none of which had steam generator equipment. They rebuilt some old boxcars and installed steam generators in those cars to use on passenger trains. That way any engine could be used and instead of 21 steam generators they only had to maintain 5.
As engines get older they also get downgraded. GP9s that were road power 30-40 years ago soldier on in local or yard service on many railroads. Even SD40-2s that were exclusively mainline freight engines when built are being displaced to local power.
Your second post usefully specifies both era/date and location. This means that the real experts should be able to give you a far more precise answer.
I can add a couple of general points though.
Working from the several comments so far it can be added that, with the exception of the change from steam to diesel each generation change of locos has not resulted in the wholesale scrapping of the older generation.
I am aware of three things that have happened.
- (A) The larger / more profitable lines that had bought into diesels early sold off “redundent” locos to smaller lines. Thus earlier types were “cascaded”. As locos got further and further “downstream” they tended to be less and less specifically used. Put another way UP or ATSF had plenty of locos and used them very selectively/specifically but a short lined that eventually received an ex UP, ATSF or whatever loco might have that loco as its only loco so that it did everything.
(B) It occurs to me that a variation of the same thing goes on within the big roads in the form that as each new loco becomes available wiith more power, finer control etc the previous new loco tends to get bumped down the pecking order. The latest locos tend to run the more important/exotic trains - once they have had any issues sorted out. A few newcomers/upgrades haven’t worked as intended and have hadonly a very short spell at the top before being either supplanted or giving way to their predeccessors being put back into the top jobs.
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Some locos were traded back to the builders for various bits to be recycled… I think that the most common part recylced was the trucks… maybe someone will confirm this please?
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(A) Some locos were either upgraded - mostly by having new electronics fitted… which I believe produces the whole business of “dash-“x”” in
Baldwin’s super center-cab locomotives in its DT-6-6 series are fascinating.
