I purchased this slide in an online auction. Two things caught my interest – a nearly new CN cowl locomotive, and a green Burlington Northern “B” unit.
The slide says this was CN train #382 at Bayview East in Ontario, taken on October 28, 1991. The fall foliage is still vibrant but in decline, and provides a nice backdrop to the brightly lit train.
Draper
CN 2424 was a GE Dash 8-40CM, built in March 1990 with serial #46185. It was part of the first of two orders placed by CN, for a total of 55 of the Dash-8 cowl units.
These are called cowl locomotives because the “shell” enclosing the guts of the locomotive is sitting on the frame, not part of the frame of the unit, and can be lifted off. There is no external walkway for crews, so to pass between locomotives they have to walk inside.
The problem with cowl units is the visibility. In “cab” locomotives with walkways behind the cab, the engineer and conductor can look down the long hood. Cowl locomotives block that and the crew has to lean out the window to see anything.
CN assistant chief of motive power William L. Draper came up with the concept of tapering the cowl to give some visibility to the crew. In this photo you can see that the conductor on this side of CN 2424 has a rear window, and the body is angled near the window to provide some visibility. The conductor cannot see directly behind the unit through this window, but the thought was this was better than nothing.
MLW’s HR-616 was the first locomotive to have the “Draper taper“, as railfans call it. EMD’s SD50F and SD60F had them, as well as GE C40-8M locomotives like CN 2424. CP’s “red barns”, SD40-2F, had a similar feature.
I saw CN 2424 in Saint John back in 2005, and I saw it several times in Manitoba in 201, 2017 and 2020. It was retired in 2023 and was sent to SLM Recycling in Welland, ON for scrapping, according to the CNRHA web site.
The B Unit
BN 4081 is an odd-looking locomotive – it has no cab for the crew.
It was a GE B30-7AB, built in September 1983 for Burlington Northern. BN had a lot of these locomotives, more than a hundred, numbered starting at 4000.
I believe the idea of cabless locomotives like 4081 was to save money. Crews only need to sit in the locomotives on either end of a set, so if you have three or more locomotives together, you could have a cabless locomotive in the middle and the crew didn’t care. The locomotives were connected together by cables (“MU” / multiple unit) so the lack of a cab wasn’t a problem.
It seems that these GE units were among the last cabless locomotives to be manufactured. I imagine the railways stopped ordering them because of the lack of flexibility a cabless unit had. You had to put it in between locomotives with a cab so it limited where you could use it.
I’m not sure that any of the B30-7AB locomotives still operate. There were a couple that went to the Central Michigan Railway, and were sold to a railway in Mexico.
Hi Steve,
I noticed the stack on BN 4081 was capped with a tarp. I did a little digging. Many of these BN B30-7A units were rebuilt at the The dormant MLW plant that was sold to GE in 1988 and ironically was used by GE during a program of rebuilding some of its earlier “Universal series”. GE closed the MLW manufacturing plant in 1993. The GE half of the plant was destroyed by fire in 2001.
So it’s likely that’s where 4081, built in 1983, was headed. In December of 1998 BN began to return the B30-7A’s to the lessor.
I wondered when BCR’s eight M420B’s were built, also cabless, and that was indeed earlier, in 1980.
Eric
The B-Unit definitely an interesting looking critter. Never seen one here. The BN/BNSF seems to like oddball power.
Cheers
AC
There’s also something called a “slug” which is just the bottom half of a B-unit – No prime mover, just traction motors.
Cheers,
Mike