B23 Super 7

How many B23 super 7's were produced. I was under the impression that there was only the group of Monagahela one which went to CR and like 4 others that were leasers some of which wound up on th Providence and Worcester. But now I found pictures of at least 3 on the Roberval and Sanguenay. So how many were there?

Greg McDonell's "Field Guide to Modern Diesel Locomotives" (Kalmbach Publishing) says that 16 B23-S7 were built, of which Monongahela got 11. I believe there were 3 GE demonstrators; I don't know whether any or all of them were sold to Monongahela.
What sort of trucks do the Roberval & Saguenay units have? My recollection (fallible!) is that the GE demonstrators and the Monongahela units were rebuilt from Western Pacific U23-B, re-using the Blomberg trucks that WP specified for its GE power.

This page has an R&S locomotive roster, and it includes the heritage info for the three B23-Super7s: http://www.trainweb.org/rosters/RS.html

This unit does not appear to have Blomberg trucks: http://rrpicturearchives.net/showPictur ... id=1412033

The Diesel Shop,
www.thedieselshop.us/GE_Super7R.html
has a roster of B23-S7 with their origins.
Three Western Pacific U23B were rebuilt as GE demonstrators. One of these and ten other ex-WP units went to the Monongahela. Roberval and Saguenay, according to this list, bought three B23-S7, two rebuilt from ATSF U23B (which would have had "Type B" trucks) and one from a Missouri Pacific U23B.

This site,
http://members.fortunecity.com/rrpics/g ... canada.htm
devoted to GE locomotives in Canada, says that R&S operates five B23-S7, so perhaps they took the two unsold demonstrators in addition to their first three.

(For fans of alternative history fantasies: Conrail kept its U23B in storage for a while after their retirement, apparently thinking hard about whether of not to start a program to rebuild them to B23-S7. GE designed the Super-7 so that railroad shops could rebuild old GE units into them, so... there is a possible world, not TOO distant from the actual world, where Juniata Locomotive Shops in Altoona, with blueprints and parts from a bit further west in Pennsylvania, turned out 98 B23-S7. ... I don't know how close Conrail management came to deciding in favor of such a program, but if they had, people would not be as sniffy now as they are about the Super-7 idea: in the actual world, GE "lost its bet" on the B23-S7, but perhaps it was not an IRRATIONAL bet for them to have made!)

(OOPS! Apparently the URL is case-sensitive: the URL for The Diesel Shop roster that I gave gets an error message if you click it: I think it works with HTML at the end in capitals.)

http://www.thedieselshop.us/GE_Super7R.HTML

(man, what a bad color combination!)

And-- going by the unit number (2287) from the Diesel Shop roster and a comment on MP U23B at George Elwood's Fallen Flags railphoto site-- the Missouri Pacific unit Roberval & Saguenay 52 was rebuilt from had FB-2 trucks!

Allen Hazen wrote: in the actual world, GE "lost its bet" on the B23-S7, but perhaps it was not an IRRATIONAL bet for them to have made!)

Hardly irrational given the number of C30-S7 packages (and new build locomotives) sold to National de Mexico...