Son of Crandall

[eric]

Last week, I saw this train picking up ties along the Harvard subdivision.

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The cab unit is a rebuilt SD40-2 but with Maintenance of Way compliant controls so that it doesn't have to be operated by an engineer.

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The scrap gondolas look to be repurposed well cars, and have the rails on top to carry the pick cranes.

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In transit, there's a pair of modified flats that the cranes are locked down on, and a cab presumably with modified MU controls for bidirectional running.

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[qballbandit]

"Son of Crandall"

That's funny!

I am pretty sure I saw that, or a complimentary consist, near Arlington Park (sadly, no more) recently.

[eric]

It was the same train set. They've been working up and down from Crystal Lake Junction. This is being stored on the stub south of Crystal Lake that used to go to Elgin on the Lake Geneva branch.

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[Unoriginal]

Canadian Pacific and now Norfolk Southern (maybe even more) have similar locomotives to this UP one. Only built with the ugly cab to go around union laws revolving around who can operate locomotives (which these usually aren't considered as).

[eric]

Union work rules are part of it, but there's also a component for hours of service and safety checks that are a little bit lighter for Maintenance of Way employees.

The guy operating the power car can do other things, versus paying a locomotive engineer to just sit in the cab for 8 to 12 hours.

this might be a fairly simple Freight animation to do on top of an SD40 frame, but I have no idea what the cab view would look like.

[eric]

There's got to be some irony in that the Crandall took a flat ended first generation six axle B-unit and gave it a second generation cowl cab, where these Relco units took a second generation six axle standard cab unit, and made it look like a first generation B-unit with a second generation cowl....