Western Railroad Discussion > We will never see this again (SP GP60s)

Around April last year the Mission Bay local running out of South San Francisco was running some interesting power. GP60's were the norm. Ex SP, DRGW, SSW, and UP GP60's were a regular thing on these locals. This one day I went down to Santa Clara to shoot passenger service, but this is what I found instead. Something that even surprised me because someone some where put all of these units on the Granite Rock train waiting to head up to Redwood City. In the year or two that I have regularly been watching the Mission Bay I have never seen these three units. Today, they are in various places, tagged and possibly repainted. Sadly all I had was my iPhone, but heres what I got. It is also incredibly rare to see these units in Santa Clara in the day light since mission bay is here between 9 and midnight. Enjoy!

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Pretty decent shots for an I-Phone.

Works for me!

ARRRRRGGGH! Your iPhone has more mp than my Canon 20D! AAAAAAAAAAAA!
Great shots, thanks for sharing.
Have fun be safe,
Bruce "Doc" Jones
Sierra Madre CA

Even with the patched unit leading, that's still a great consist.

I'll miss seeing the GP60s on my trips up to the penninsula.

Excellent image quality from that Iphone!

Rich

Thanks for posting these. They look much better here than on iPhone's small LCD display!

In a perfect world, They would've brought the consist down to the wye at CP arena to put 2005 in the back of the consist :) but beggars can't be choosers

I saw a Cotton Belt GP60 out near Fallon mid sept.It appeared to be unpatched ,although I couldnt get real close.The same loco was in the Sparks yard the next morning,must be the local power.
Regards,dK

Very cool lash-up!
It's interesting to note how well the red noses have held up on the GP60's compared to the similar-aged SP AC's.

Fizzboy7 Wrote:

> It's interesting to note how well the red noses
> have held up on the GP60's compared to the
> similar-aged SP AC's.

...or the SD40M-2's. The worst red nose of the trio of GP60's was the one you can't see, 9652:

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,2724761,2724929#2724929

Red, orange, and yellow paint pigments used to be very stable. But since the brilliant fade-resistant heavy-metal pignments
- chrome yellow (lead chromate)
- cadmium yellow (cadmium sulfide)
- cadmium orange (cadmium sulfoselenide)
- cadmium red (cadmium sulfoselenide with even more selenium)
were banned for commercial use, they're become the least fade-resistant paint colors.

This is a big problem for museum railroads. S.P.'s and W.P.'s paint schemes use plenty of red and orange, and these now fade into mucky mud-colored pastels far faster than they used to.

- Doug Debs

DWDebs/2472 Wrote:

> This is a big problem for museum railroads.
> S.P.'s and W.P.'s paint schemes use plenty of red
> and orange, and these now fade into mucky
> mud-colored pastels far faster than they used to.

The above examples of 1994-vintage reds fading at vastly different rates makes me wonder if there isn't more to the story than just the presence or absence of heavy metal pigments. We've seen a similar thing with the Santa Fe 600-series versus the BNSF 700-series warbonnets, built only a few years apart. The clear coat gradually flaked off the 600's and the red underneath faded to pink on most of them, but whatever they did differently on the 700's worked because most of them are still a pretty respectable red after 15 years. We've also seen cases of H2-painted BNSF Dash 9's one number apart in series that faded at very different rates. Evidently different contractors were either applying different paint or applying it differently, with widely divergent results.

In the case of WP, Portola sure seems to have found the secret formula for a durable orange. The 2001 has been running around in its current paint job for over a decade and still looks fantastic. Compare that to the performance of the pre-EPA paint the unit came with. In this photo, 2001 was about a decade old, and while the orange has held up reasonably well, the silver looks terrible:

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,2826533

WP GP7's 703 and 713 and GP9 729 in these photos were about 20, and the orange definitely isn't luminous anymore. I'd say it's held up just about as well as the orange on the now 16-year-old H1-painted 960-series BNSF Dash-9's.

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1277284
http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1062157
http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1793544

And then there are these photos of fading warbonnets from the passenger era. The U30CG was only 6 years out of the factory.

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/attachments/fullsize/450000/GE.U30CG.ATSF.8001.KANSAS_CITY.KS.07.21.72.MENGE.jpg
http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,1727558,1727558#1727558