Last week, Mike Gardner and I positioned ourselves at Keets Road south of Greenfield, Massachusetts on the old Boston & Maine Connecticut River Line.
Pan Am Railway’s symbol freight EDPL (East Deerfield Yard to Plainville, Connecticut) had departed East Deerfield and was idling on the Deerfield Loop track waiting to head south.
Finally, the train received the signal to proceed and began its southward trek. In the lead was GP40 352, one of several Pan Am diesels equipped with cab-signal equipment for operation over Amtrak south of Springfield, Massachusetts.
Once on the Connecticut River mainline the engineer opened the throttle to accelerate and his locomotives erupted with an dramatic display of noise and effluence.
Here are two of the views I exposed; a color view made digitally using a FujiFilm X-T1 with 90mm f2.0 fixed telephoto lens, and a black & white view exposed with a Leica on Kodak Tri-X.
They don’t have a lot of options. That’s one of the few locomotives that runs which is equipped with ACSES (cab signaling equipment) for operation south of Springfield. Brian S.
Looks like that locomotive has problems bigger than just idling, waiting for a signal. Generally, a sign of bad, leaky injectors, dirty filters, a couple of “dead holes” or a combination thereof or a turbo needs to be changed out.
The color shot shows it nicely but the B&W shot is the one the railroad would show the Clean Air folk. The B&W really doesn’t demonstrate the the issue with a great degree of detail, but I don’t know if that’s the aim.
I wouldn’t want to be track side doing a roll by lest there would be a very good chance you’d get an oil shower.
Naturally, it “should’ve” been bad ordered at Greenfield and switched out. Maybe the Pan Am has the “run ’em until they drop” maintenance system. Good thing New England generally has lots of clean air and no Clean Air folks lurking, track side. It’d be interesting to hear if that locomotive ran all the way to CT….and back.