Yes, originally ordered by Auto-Train. Built in 1974, sat in inventory at GE until fall 1976, when Conrail was new and needed anything available that could move freight. The fact that these 4 were destined to be orphans on the roster didn't matter, after all, government money was involved.
If they had been built with high speed gearing, they probably would have lost that during the re-trucking and modifications performed prior to being sold to Conrail.
All A-T U36Bs were ordered with the Blomberg trucks. In 1974, A-T 4004 was retrucked with the then-experimental FB-2 truck (common on later dash-7s) for testing purposes, and was promptly totalled in a crossing accident/derailment 3 weeks later.
I recall the Conrail U36Bs became GE property upon retirement, possibly used as trade-ins for the new GE's of the day, and were stripped of some parts by Conrail (under GE's direction), and the hulks scrapped. Alot of the CR U-23Bs were also being traded-in/procured by GE during that time, too, as hulks for Super7 rebuilds that never came to be. The U36Bs were probably of lesser value to GE for the Super7 program, but they did prosess various parts (the ones removed by Conrail for GE) that would be of value to the Super7 program.
Railroad Forums
Conrail U36Bs
- Discussion related to the operations and equipment of Consolidated Rail Corp. (Conrail) from 1976 to its present operations as Conrail Shared Assets. Official web site can be found here: CONRAIL.COM.