Did Guilford almost buy GP59s in the '80s?

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=991619

So I was browsing through old pics on RR pics when I saw this. Guilford testing out GP59's. How serious was Guilford about buying new power back then? Did they try out any other power?

That was my comment at the bottom of the photo, which is based on information I found in Scott Hartley's excellent book "Guilford: Five Years of Change." If I remember correctly, EMD had a batch of GP59 demo units that toured all over the country on various railroads. I'm sure Guilford was more than happy to use them, but I have to seriously doubt that they were ever actually interested in buying them. After all, they weren't even interested in keeping the BM GP38-2s and GP40-2s. They only kept them until the lease was up.

GP59s would have been a good fit for Guilford, if you think about it... comparable horsepower to the GP40-2, with improved reliability, improved adhesion, and better fuel economy... but even back in those days, there was no way that Mellon & Fink were gonna sign on the dotted line for brand new locomotives. Instead, we got bargain basement GP35s and GP40s. And the rest is history.

Hartley also mentions GE B39-8 and EMD SD60 models made demo runs on Guilford, alas to no sales...

-Alan S.

If B&M had remained independent and had stayed reasonably healthy in terms of financials, it is not out of the realm of possibilities that B&M might have eventually leased or purchased GP59s, or perhaps even GP49s or GP60s. I'm sure that's what EMD was hoping for.

It's a bit more difficult to speculate as to what MEC might have bought for new power if they had remained independent... GE might have tried to sell them on the B23-Super7 (with parts from traded-in MEC U25Bs?), or maybe even the B32-8. MEC never had turbocharged EMDs until after the Guilford era, so it's hard to say whether they would have gone that route, or if they would have leaned toward late-model GP38-2s, which EMD continued to build until 1986.

I think they let those newer units go due to a high buy-out cost at the end of the lease - the used power they bought elsewhere was simply cheaper per-unit. You saw Conrail do something similar, keeping GP30s and GP35s in and out of service as late as 1995 while allowing leases to expire on numerous PC GP38s and GP40s in the early-mid 80s - some of the units that went to Guilford even then.

Reason being the price to buy the unit would be set when the lease is made. It may have been more favorable to have a higher buy price at the end, or it may simply have been due to the shaky financial condition of PC or B&M when the leases were made. Either way, the price was either more than what the units would bring on the market, or the older units on the market were that much cheaper to buy outright.


And once they discovered the bargain basement stuff would work adequately, they kept going back for more - SD26's, SD45s, U30Cs, SD39s, GP35s, more GP40s when Conrail dumped the last of them, and most recently GP40-2Ws.