I was talking to our equipment manager at work this afternoon, and he had pictures of his latest purchase. A EMD GP-7 locomotive was added to our fleet. V-16 Detroit engine, 1500 hp. Built in the early 1950's, so it has over 50 years of use on it, yet it still had a pricetag of 80,000 dollars. It will be used in one of our company railyards to move railcars around.


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Imagine having to buy a new EMD or GE today, average price for new locomotives is 1.5 mil. each

how do you transport them things??

You make arrangements with other railroads and either have it pulled to wherever you need it, or you drive it there on their tracks. This one will be working in a new railyard in we built in Mexico. It will be used to move cars around, placing loaded cars in spot and making up outbound trains after the cars are emptied. While we rarely cross the border, we arrange for railcars of product to be moved to a yard south of the border, then trucks we co-own with a mexican company will unload the railcars and deliver the loads.

So what if say a private party bought a locomotive and there werent any tracks to get to the destination? Ive seen engines and rail cars where there arent tracks for miles.

Depending on the size of the locomotove, they can be moved by truck. Rarely happens with larger loco's like a road switcher type, but there are many smaller models that could be broken down to a reasonable weight and moved. The real expense is the rule that if a part is removable, it has to be removed for transport. You end up hiring a big crane to lift the locomotive up, so you can remove the trucks (wheelsets) from underneath it.

But, there are many older type of loco's that could be of interest to someone who collects them. Smaller ones that did switch work in times past. We have a GE SW1200 in Chicago, and with a little effort, it could be hauled off by road. Small locomotive, built in 1956, 1200 hp. Few major railroads run them anymore, but there are a lot of them in various places doing switch work.

Railcars are much easier, since they weight much less and you are mainly concerned with the dimensions. The inside of almost any ralicar is nothing more than air space, and the bigger railcars are uually in the 60k weight range. that makes them relatively easy to transport.