Western Railroad Discussion > Ugly Sounding Horns (UP's Yuma Sub, SoCal)

On a different weekend than the one I reported on earlier, I caught a couple of trains in SoCal before heading to the airport.

First one, an eastbound stacker, had an EMD leader, an SD70M with expectedly obnoxious-sounding K3 horn. FiveChime's and Evan_Werkema's ears might be hurting from that.

There's a handful of SD70Ms with decent sounding horns, and I caught one in 2016:

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,4106018

I mention this, not just to boast, but to encourage others to post reports here on TO if they run across an SD70M leader with not-so-obnoxious horns.

I chased the train to try out the Old Town Banning location. The train is ZLAAI-ish, with 5 engines, no DPU, and all 53' boxes. Second reason why I went there was that I saw a westbound signal lit green on Main 1 further west near Beaumont summit, so I expected another train to show up soon.

(Note the ballast train on the balloon tracks at West Colton in the 2nd clip)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/28/23 21:36 by cchan006.

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The westbound, a short 2x0 manifest, had a C44AC (UP 6434) with even uglier sounding horn, painfully fouled. Sorry Jim and Evan, this one hurts your ears even more.

There was some visual pain on this train, too, the graffiti, which is good for heated discussions here on TO. I documented what I found to be (relatively) eye-pleasing on this train, while I went to the crossing in Redlands to document the entire train, before I headed to the airport.

With plenty of empties, especially the centerbeams, the train seemed a cinch to handle by the engineer, as he went down San Timoteo Canyon with Z train speeds (40-45 mph). I realized this at the start of descent (near the Centennial Memorial Bridge), so I chased it like a Z train and had plenty of margin at Redlands.

Old Town Banning has a nice mountain backdrop when the camera is angled eastwards (for westbounds). Overcast skies gave me the freedom to choose angles. Might look good in the middle of summer when the sun heads north. Unfortunately, I didn't get the meet I tried to anticipate for... by about 2 minutes (train length).

- Graffiti my eyes understood.
- Graffiti can cause discussions to do this.
- Video of the westbound manifest train.

That's it for the foul-sounding report.

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/28/23 21:33 by cchan006.

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Thanks for sharing!  Great videos....the SD70M horn is typical of that series of locos.  I also read on here that SD70M locos can't lead trains because of the lack of PTC...apparently your video proves otherwise.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/23 06:53 by bnsf6606.

Awesome grafitti! Even though the horn sounded bad, its fun to see a flagless SD70M still leading a train. 

Thanks Charles. Fortunately, the horn siuation got better with the 5 chime K horns, especially the K5LL's on the SD70ACEs and AH units.
I thought for a while that the K3 was going to be it as so many older UP and BNSF units ended up with those.
Regards, Jim Evans

bnsf6606 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for sharing!  Great videos....the SD70M
> horn is typical of that series of locos.  I also
> read on here that SD70M locos can't lead trasins
> because of the lack of PTC...apparentl;y your
> video provies otherwise.

What I've heard is that UP's SD70Ms don't have DPU capability, so when it leads, there are no DPUs. It also means when it is not MU'd in the front consist, it has to MU with a DPU-capable unit to function as DPU, and I see examples of that quite often.

Don't know the specifics of the PTC situation, but it's possible some SD70Ms don't have it installed yet?

It used to be common to see pair of SD70Ms assigned as manned helpers on Beaumont Hill. Recently, I see GEs and SD70ACes, while the SD70Ms are assigned to locals.