At least to me. Going down I-10 in Southern Arizona, somewhere before Tucson, and looked off to my left and there was a railroad track full of train engines. I saw at least 2 miles of it, and did not see the beginning or the end. Not moving, but all engines. miles

Probably just parking them....

Burlington Northern in the 80s use to park a whole bunch of engines every winter in the train yard there in St Paul... I'd have to drive thru it to get to West Publishing, an account of mine...

They didn't need their entire fleet during winter time, so they would park 25 to 30 % of it, for 4 months or 5...

Funny thing was, they would just leave the locomotives idling the entire 4 months... I thought that was kind of wasteful, but talking to a supervisor over there one day, he told me it was cheaper to just let the diesels run for 4 months at idle, than it would be to try and get them started, after sitting for 4 months... especially in MN winter temps...

The ranchers in the northern most parts of the country leave their diesel pick up trucks running all winter.

they are basically in storage waiting to be fitted with some new stuff to meet e.p.a. requirements.
that's one version i have heard
here's another:
http://tucson.com/business/local/id...5a8e4f5-0d99-5c20-a18e-06bf3ad54436.html

I've never seen the engines stockpiled like that, but there's a line of tracks nearby they use for storing rail cars. The locals ain't too crazy about it, but that's all they use that single track for. They got tired of the cars getting broken into by vagrants and just leave the doors open now.

Must have moved them south for winter? They were all stored in east central wy last fall!! Not as much coal to haul don't need em all now

They've been there for months.
Was like that back in August too.
My son said it was called a power pull.

That's the story that I got from BNSF locally when I inquired after a trip to Tucson a couple of weeks ago.

Not here, just plug 'em in over night.


We have left old diesel tractors run for a few days in a row during real cold snaps but not pickups.

I work for BNSF. We have stored locomotives all over our territory, they have been drained and shut down and will remain that way until business picks up again.

Any interesting old locos? It takes a better train nut than me to know the differences, but at times I have seen some rare ones here, on a UP line.

Large fleets of locos are parked.
Nothing to move.
Erie GE loco plant laid off 1500 last year.
Texas GE loco plant just laid 250 and cut the rest to 32 hours a week.
Its ugly.

dave

Paid opposition of the pipe line is coming into focus. miles

I worked in a diesel shop for a while when I was a kid...

locomotives do not get anti-freeze in the cooling system, just corrosion inhibiter, so anything with water in them must be left running in the winter to keep from freezing. it's not because they are hard to start when cold. a half a can of starting either in each cylinder bank's air box and good batteries will almost always do the trick...

but I bet if the price of scrap steel goes up, many of those 'stored' locomotives will get recycled...

Between Tucson and Benson....

Been there for a looong time...

I was hoping someone would tell us that they were stockpiling the engines down there so they would be ready to haul the new border fenceing materials.

I saw the same thing and did some quick research. Coal industry decline is the main driver. Union Pacific has about 1400 engines idle nation wide of which approximately 300 are in Benson, AZ. Each engine is approximately $2 million.

Benson = $600 million
Nation wide = $2.8 billion

Reminds me of these sights you see on YouTube where there's old trains that have been sitting for decades.

We used to run across abandoned strip mine equipment back in the old mines down in Ohio once in a while. Old dozers, shovels, Euc's etc. They'd put a lot of that stuff in the bottom of the pits and just let the water overtake them. Some of these spots are popular dive sights now.

If we can get rid of E P A and get the coal mines opened up again those babies will be pullin the load again !

If they can hold on [b][color:#3333FF]just a little longer...[/color][/b]

Off topic, but I was once hunting Gambles quail in Southern Nevada in a way back remote corner of the desert. A massive coal train fully loaded was passing on the tracks. The engine was about a quarter mile past me when the entire train emergency braked. It was one of the loudest craziest things I ever saw. Never found out what the problem was.

I don't think that the UP stores any engines or cars - they just keep running them back and forth through town when I am out walking and need to cross the tracks.

i have a long relationship with the santa fe. try about 80 years of service between my father and grandfather, into territorial times in arizona. A high school friend works for santa fe in yuma, often takes video of the different engines running through there.
as a kid i use to get to sit in the engineers lap and drive those engines. Would never be allowed today, but at the time i kind of had the run of them.

Those have been there for at least a year. Used to fly over them going between Douglas and Tucson.

The line finally got long enough to see them from I-10. Most likely will go under I-10 and continue to the north if they keep parking them there.

On this same trip, somewhere between Texarkana and Wichita Falls, I saw a junk yard that had at least 20 cabooses in it. miles

Steady flow of trains, coal and otherwise, going past here...

Ha... I was in Madison, WI yesterday... Strange town indeed. Wife was in a grocery store and witnessed 2 men with a child. One of the guys was admonishing the child to call the other guy "mommy"...

Just as well I didn't see that...

Sorry for the hijack but this was a thread about "something strange"...

How long has it been since they used cabooses?

Should the plural of caboose just be caboose, as in moose, or should it be cabeese as in geese?

Could be just old used up engines. Park them in AZ. until a 3rd world country buys them. GE did build a new factory in Fort Worth last year to build engines. I'm sure GE had a few contracts to build before they put in the factory. We have a little RR headquarters located here.

^This.

Before the fall of 2008, all of those locomotives were running 24/7. Immediately after, even more of them went into storage. They've been gradually returning to service, by fits and starts, ever since. The only EPA compliance retrofitting I am aware of is for locos working in Calif.

UP locomotives (almost all of them now) have autostart devices that kick in before the coolant (no antifreeze, as another poster mentioned) is in danger of freezing. They shut themselves back down once they are warmed up, unless actually in use. These long term stored locomotives are dead and drained though. Doesn't take that much to get them up and running when business demands, but there are tax implications to account for that effect how quickly the decision is made to do so.

The price of a new locomotive is too great to just scrap them because they're old. Most of the locomotives I see stored are still quite useful, although lacking some of the technology that would allow them to be a controlling (lead) locomotive.

O

We replaced cabooses on freight trains with rear end telemetry devices in the late eighties. IIRC, that was all but complete by about '90.

Miles, those engines are parked just a few miles west of where I live. They have been there a couple years. Good friend of mine is retired from the railroad and was an engineer out of Tucson. According to him, ctsmith nailed it. Decline in the coal industry and lackluster economy in general.

When you see CCCC this weekend ask him about them. He comes through here quite often.

The tracks used to run north of the interstate, cross over the interstate to the south side at Marsh Station Road, make a loop and cross back over the interstate at Empirita Road. The underpass at Marsh Station was low clearance and narrow. Couple years ago they moved the Marsh Station Exit about a mile east the tracks stayed north of the interstate. UP uses that old loop to store locomotives. Like ctsmith said, about 300 of them at $2mil a piece.

How many locomotives does a NG pipeline need?

Sycamore

Kind of irrelevant, since pipelines don't go everywhere. But we don't need to get rid of the EPA for energy business to increase. China's economy is going to have to recover for coal shipments to get back up to what they were. Or some other third world country kick in.

This sounds like you will not be attending. Sorry about not getting to see you. miles

When I worked for Southern Pacific RR, our conductors called the devices DFD's...

Dumb F'n Devices... because they took away a person's job and reduced the size of train crew's.

I've seen the same thing in Grand Junction, hundreds of engines just sitting.

Miles, just go a little further west on I10 and turn right toward Tucson at Kolb - you will then see a host of stored airplanes parked neatly in row after row. Some great memories parked there. If you like older airplanes and their history, visit the Pima Air Museum there on the SE side of the Old Pueblo - well worth the time.

For whomever asked, some authority told me the proper plural for caboose is "cabooses" if it's two and "cabeese" if three or more. Saw three big cabeese together waddling through a grocery in Alb a while back - side to side they wouldn't fit across the aisle.

Maybe it will pick up again

Where in you guys areas are they still mining coal?? I know of the one in thunder basin wy hunt there and one Alabama, it is a really deep underground got extended family working that one!! Only from S E Kansas where coal was king nothing anymore here of course!!

Where in you guys areas are they still mining coal?? I know of the one in thunder basin wy hunt there and one Alabama, it is a really deep underground got extended family working that one!! Only from S E Kansas where coal was king nothing anymore here of course!!

We had a 730 JD diesel loader tractor that we had to let idle from about December thru February. It was Dad's favorite tractor and he wouldn't let me sell it. When he passed away I got rid of the damn thing about 30 days later.