B&O 9505 (Chessie System B&O Heritage Unit?)

I was surfing the web today trying to find some information about csx locomotives, and I stumbled upon a page dedicated to odd locomotives in the Chessie System. One of them in particular was an EMD NW2 painted in a fresh B&O livery, but it had a Chessie System logo on its cab. With this in mind, is this locomotive considered a heritage unit (and possibly one of the first heritage units to exist) since it has the Chessie logo on a fresh B&O livery?

http://www.trainweb.org/chessiephotos/p ... sual26.jpg

I can't answer your question, but that sure does look nice. Thanks for posting the link, wish those things were still roaming around.

The only info I can find on it indicates that it was sold 12/79, and never made it into Chessie paint. Hard to call it a heritage unit, if it was in B&O paint with B&O reporting marks the entire time. Chessie never had it's own reporting mark, it was simply the holding company.

I could be mistaken - I think the 9500 series engines started life on the C&O and were migrated to the B&O in the early 70's.

mmi16 wrote:I could be mistaken - I think the 9500 series engines started life on the C&O and were migrated to the B&O in the early 70's.

Not all of them . 9547-9551 were originally B&O 555-559. There may be others, I don't know.

There's no RRPictureArchives listing for the unit, but 9500 and 9506 were originally B&O 400 and 406. 400-408 were all part of one order in October/November 1940. It appears some 9500 series units are originally C&O, but the majority appear to have always been B&O.

Assuming 405 would be our unit in question, given the way those units were renumbered.

I doubt this counts as a "Heritage Unit". If I'm not mistaken, one has to have been repainted into an original or defunct railroad's scheme after it's been painted for it's owners; see the EL SD45-2 running around in NJ for the former and the UP/NS programs for the latter. Hangers on to old schemes, like 9505, don't qualify - or else every ATSF or BN patchjob would be a heritage unit and thus BNSF would have the largest program.