BN passenger train - 1970/71

[CBQ Fan]

I had thought the trucks were the major culpret.  I have read where the decision to go with the special trucks were the downfall.

[Vince Gortner]

One of the theories of failure was related to the HT-C trucks hunting at speed.  May have been related to the taper of the wheelsets and/or the specific "hollow bolster" variant of the HT-C trucks - that's the theory - but other competing theories were related to the huge sloshing water tank located above the frame, plus the weight of the giant underframe fuel/water tank, the shoddy condition of the baggage cars that trailed behind the locomotives, and the generally poor track conditions.   

[nkalanaga]

True, the SDP40F was basically a passenger version of the SD40-2, but as several have said, there were frame and truck differences.  The BN didn't have any serious problems with them, and they performed fine on the Empire Builder.  I doubt that the weight of the fuel/water was an issue, as the BN bought other diesels with similar size tanks to avoid refueling stops.  And, as Vince noted, many of the loudest complaints came from roads with poor track.  It's possible they were simply too big, in length or weight, for the track conditions.

One magazine reported that an apparently unique problem on the SP was out of gauge wheels.  This was finally traced to one crossing being out of gauge, and when the units hit it "at speed", the frogs were forcing the wheels out of gauge.  Fix the crossing, and  the units ran a lot better, and with less wheel wear.  Whether the story was true I have no idea, but since wheels aren't held in place by anything except friction, I guess it could happen.

[Vince Gortner]

I'm always interested in alternate history scenarios.  One of my favorite parts of the hobby, so I'm enjoying this thread...   sorry to contribute to the hijacking in the direction of SDP40F failures.

If you were going to build something like this with a mix of stainless and cascade green passenger cars, and you did pursue the FP40-2  concept in model form would you go cascade green with white hockey stick or maybe develop some other scheme?  The Chicago RTA F40C's had some rather unique looking stainless steel side panels on them.  To this day I'm not sure if I like them, but it raises some possibilities for what a dedicated passenger BN FP40-2 could look like.  Stainless steel and cascade green look pretty together!

[CBQ Fan]

I am thinking of the white face look for the FP40-2 and white Burlington Northern in big white lettering like the GP-50's.  I am sure there would have been some hockey stick attempts.  Very interesting.

[nkalanaga]

For 1974 I think I'd use the hockey stick on the locomotives.  It looked fine on the Fs and Es.  On the other hand, the executive train looked a lot better after they went to a straight white line on the cars.   I'd probably keep the hockey stick though, simply because it was the only scheme used in revenue service, and the only one likely to be available on painted models.  For the same reason I'd probably use either rebuilt Fs (no visual change needed) or FP45s, as they're commercially available, needing only a coat of paint.

Stainless steel is easy to do in BN, needing only a painted, unlettered car and a name plate.  But I would imagine that the BN would keep cars on their original routes as much as possible, at least in the early years, meaning that my road would see mainly ex GN and NP cars.  On the eve of Amtrak the North Coast Limited through Pasco still looked much the same as before the merger, except for the few BN and an occasional GN car.

[Vince Gortner]

Still thinking about this....

http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/bn/bn9985adb.jpg

And I do like the whole idea of a non-Amtrak BN train.   I do wish Athearn would do another run of FP45s though.  I have a couple that I stripped and am going to modify to stand in as SDP40Fs in the bloody nose scheme, running on Atlas SD60 frames to get the HT-C trucks right.  That was an expensive pile of parts, even after I sold off the really nice FP45 mechanisms.