Why are these engines named;
Lilly:
Marlie:
Piper:
Because it is what the owner wanted to do!
I suspect the may be named after his duaghters.
Probably a good guess. The company president’s bio says he has three children.
A common enough practice - although it usually doesn’t get down to such a personal level. Cities and racehorses are among the labels I can recall.
Maybe ex wives?
Ex wives? Yeah I have paid out enough to them to buy a locomotive lol. Ours are named after cities on the line. The Rock did some for people,but I have never heard of naming them for kids. That would be awesome if its the case.
There’s an entire railroad in Oklahoma named for the owner’s children: AT&L stands for “Austin,” “Todd” and “Ladd” if I recall correctly. John Timm
The DM&E’s locomotives are all named after cities along the tracks, as in City of Lake Preston, City of Brookings, etc.
I used to have some names for certain locomotives; however, I don’t think the railroad would have appreciated my putting those names on the units.
Zardoz,
Ex’es or girlfriends? [:-,] [(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D]
OR you can name your SW-10 “BUBBA”-linked here[swg]
I was thinking more along the lines of:
Piece of Crap
Piece of S___
Useless Junk
Cheap & Nothing Works
…and other such utterances and exclamations of frustrating non-operating locomotives.
In the US naming of locomotives pretty much died out by about 1900. In Britain it continued on well into the diesel era. However some railroads do it still today; I believe DM&E named some engines after cities on their line, and Minnesota Commercial has a few named engines too, including “Crocodile G-E”, a GE unit originally built for service in Australia.
Doesn’t CSX have The Spirit of Miami, The Spirit of Tampa, and the Spirit of Grafton?
Your post reminded me that one of the more obvious examples in the midwest is Metra which names its locomotives for the cities along its various routes.
John Timm
And how could anyone forget the story behind what arguably is Metra’s most famous locomotive? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/4/173554/4787
Yes. CSX has named several engines in honor of on line cities.
The RI did indeed name some locomotives (mostly the first batch of GP38-2 but some others that had been rebuilt) for people, cities, states, and groups along the RI lines. Here’s a link to one of the GP38-2 that’s most appropriate for the Trains forums.
http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/ri/ri4315ads.jpg
I couldn’t find picture of the RI 4310 in my limited on-line search, but it’s name was “The American Railfan.”
Jeff
I always wondered about the Ivan the Terrible one. Till I finally heard the story it was a nickname to a grain elevator guy. One was also named after DPM.
Zardoz I have a few names like that for the DME and CP junk we have been giving.But seeings this is a family forum Ill just shout them at random while going down the road.
Going back to the age of superpower steam, the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac had its, “Governors,” and, ‘Generals.’
Long before that, locomotive names were common. Think of the great locomotive chase between the General and the Texas, or the named (as well as numbered) locomotives of the Virginia and Truckee and the Central Pacific…
Chuck
Illinois Central applied names to its GP38-2’s (9600-9639) when they were purchased. The people named all had ties of some sort to the Illinois Central and included Casey Jones, Sim Webb, Samuel Clemens, Abraham Lincoln and others.