Conrail GP38-2 No. 8089 and its caboose are en route to their next assignment in Canton in May 1985. The unit was built for Penn Central in February 1973 and would later go to work for Norfolk Southern.
Photograph by Robert Farkas
Posts Tagged ‘Conrail GP38-2’
A Locomotive and its Caboose
June 27, 2021Railroading as it Once Was: The Only Day I Got Paid to Take a Ride on a Reading Locomotive
June 9, 2016
No. 2187 as it looked in Conrail paint with my work train.
No. 2187 as it looked when it still wore some of its original Reading Livery. By now it had been patched as it sat in Rutherford, Pennsylvania in September 1978.
In April 2001 I was called for a work train. I took a taxi from Cleveland to Alliance and worked as needed.
Normally, work trains rated older units, often ex-Conrail GP38-2s. This day was no exception to the older unit rule, but imagine my surprise to see this motive power when I arrived in Alliance. It was an Ohio Central GP30, former Conrail and originally Reading Lines. I sure didn’t expect to be working on a Reading GP30 in 2001.
The train was a cable plow train, a machine that dug a trench and dropped fiber optics tubing into the hole.
Note the large spools of plastic conduit both on our train and off to the side. It was certainly a different assignment from the normal road jobs I was working at the time.
The day went smoothly, although it was long, with a taxi ride back to Cleveland once we were done.
It has been the only time I’ve been paid to work with a former RDG GP30.
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