| Posted by xBNSFer on November 13, 2018 | |
Don't you mean EASTERN half?
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Thanks for the comment. No, I did mean the western half. The C628s were banned west of Sayre sometime in 1972 (I'm not sure whether they were still allowed on the Ithaca branch, but they certainly weren't allowed on the mainline west of Van Etten Junction.) The N&W power came in from Buffalo, so N&W six-axle power wouldn't be able to come on to the LV at all if it was banned from the western half of the railroad. My father has lots of photos of N&W power in New Jersey from 1973. It was all 4-axle (GP35/GP30/GP9/U28B/U30B). By 1974, the run-throughs had stopped and the roads swapped power in Buffalo on all Apollos and Mercuries. In 1975 and 1976 we photographed the power swaps a number of times in Buffalo, and the N&W used six-axle power on all the trains we saw (SD35/SD40/SD45).
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| Posted by xBNSFer on November 28, 2018 | |
Thanks for that. I remember seeing somewhere in one of my LV books a comment about LV trying to keep the C628s out of NJ, that's why I was thinking you might have meant the eastern half. In any event, I think LV's problem was with the C628s in particular, since they were supposedly really hard on track. Maybe they didn't ban all 6-axle power (they didn't have any other 6 axles to my knowledge), but just the track beater C628's. I guess if they banned them west of Van Etten Jct. (or perhaps Sayre), their track out that way must have been suspect (and being flatter, perhaps saw more trains running at speed, as opposed to negotiating the curves and grades in PA), not that MOST of their track wasn't! Or, maybe they just got "special dispensation," because they couldn't resist their (usual) urge to run up some miles on anything foreign they got their hands on.
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