I grew up next to the Illinois Central in the 80s and early 90s, I always enjoyed this road as it was always an interesting variety of locomotives and trains, you never knew what you were going to see.
I remember when the IC bought several SD40-2 locomotives from the BN and I remember reading and seeing that they removed the dynamic brakes from some of these but others still had them. I could see why a mostly flat railroad might not order new locomotives with dynamic brakes to save cost, but I always thought it was interesting that they would go to the trouble of removing them on a used locomotive that already had them, but not all.
Just a thought without knowing the specifics. Unless the lead locomotive has dynamics any trailing units with or without DB is useless as there’s no way to MU the control to them. IC probably never saw the reason to fully adopt DB and any used locomotive purchase that had the equipment installed became a maintenance cost.
As i recall the FRA states that if the equipment was ON the locomotive it had to be maintained so the simple solution was to completely remove it.
Along similar lines I believe it is the reason so many added lighting devices (think SP’s Mars lights, etc.) are removed from second-hand locos. If the light fixture is still on the loco it has to be in operable condition. So much cheaper just to remove it or blank-out the location of the light.
I seem to remember hearing something about that on one of my railroad DVDs for Illinois Central. With the exception of one of the lines in Southern Illinois (Edgewood, IL to Fulton, KY via Carbondale, IL, etc.), they had pretty flat lines to run on. I remember the Illinois Central Gulf days as well as I lived near one of their lines in Chicagoland. Really enjoyed the ICG.
The Rock Island did the same thing on used engines they acquired. I believe they disconnected the dynamic brakes for two reasons. One, having to maintain them. Two, engineers weren’t supposed to use dynamic brakes when foreign power ran through. Since dynamics weren’t supposed to be used I don’t think they had training on the proper use of dynamics.
Disable the dynamic brakes and you don’t need to worry about them being used or maintained.
If they physically removed the dynamic braking system from the engines, maybe they could recoup a bit of the purchase price by selling the removed parts to other railroads?