Lease Units and Wide Cabs

Hello,

I have two questions,

1. Why can some railroads paint leased units in their own RR Livery, as opposed to some RR's leasing the units and keeping them in the Lease Company's Livery. Is it part of the agreement or is it just that some RR's never get around to painting it? Do railroads still lease equipment from other railroads like they did years ago?

2. When did the EMD & GE Wide cabs first become standard on all new locomotives?

Thanks,

Mark

Mem160 wrote:Hello,

I have two questions,

1. Why can some railroads paint leased units in their own RR Livery, as opposed to some RR's leasing the units and keeping them in the Lease Company's Livery. Is it part of the agreement or is it just that some RR's never get around to painting it? Do railroads still lease equipment from other railroads like they did years ago?

2. When did the EMD & GE Wide cabs first become standard on all new locomotives?

Thanks,

Mark

The railroads that lease units painted in there own livery are just that leased units the railroad orders there locomotives with a rent to own option at the most part it is cheaper to lease a locomotive then it is to buy it New from the Factory. Lets say Union Pacific puts in an order for 100 EMD SD75's for exsample that unit might run 6.5 million dollars per unit. The UP signes a rent to own contract for 20 years. After 20+ years of wear and tear all 100 units might only be worth lets say $50,000 dollars each the Railroad has the option to buy that unit after the 20 year contract runs out or send it back to the builder and lease anouther newer locomotive. The Builder in return will sell off the old units if the UP dose not want them so EMD will sell them to someone like HCLX or CEFX who buys them for $50,000 and in return leases them out again till they are completeley spent and sent to the parts yard.

Railroads still lease locomotives from outher railroads mostley for a short time untill the outher road eather buys a 2ed hand locomotive or gets there back in service. You'll see this practice being done mostley on short lines and some regionals.

Wide Cabs became standered in the U.S. in the early 90's even thow they were being used long befor that in the mid 70's on Canadian railroads.
Wide cabs were found to be safer than narrow cabs which offer little protection in accdents. Norfolk Southern even after the Southern and N&W Merger was the only road still ordering units with both high short hoods and narrow cabs untill both EMD and GE stoped makeing them in the 90's.

A few addendums:

Virtually ALL locomotives today are leased; the exceptions being units twenty-plus years old, which are owned outright by their operating railroad companies. Reason being it's not practical, from a business/liquidity standpoint, for a railroad to come up with the enormous purchase price for a new unit.

Those, are ones leased to the roads long-term. They are shipped in the operating road's colors and counted as part of its locomotive fleet.

The older leased units, the "Rent-A-Wreck" HLCX or FURX or CEFX units, are run by CSX (and some other roads) as a cost-saving way to get interim power. They are under short-term lease agreements - apparently there is some tax savings in obtaining power this way. Certainly they are neither very economical nor very reliable...and NOT very powerful. The leasing companies obtain them as cast-offs from mostly the Western roads, the UP or the BNSF...and they're pretty much worn out by the time they are sent out as leases.

There are a few widebody Rent-A-Wrecks, mostly old Conrail or LMS units. Not many.

The Canadian widebodies don't have much relation to the current offerings beyond the concept. Old EMD and GE widebodies from Canada (they're serviced at CSX's Frontier Yard) are identical; apparently they were built to Canadian governmental specs. Nor are they any more quiet inside than conventionals of the era.

The oldest widebodies I've seen were GEs dating to 1989. The last conventional-cab order, I believe, was the Conrail/NS EMD SD-70 order, shipped in kit form to Conrail's Junita shops, and assembled with conventional cabs. Those were the 2500 series, built 1999.