U25B with EMD 567

I started working at Econorail's Storage yard today and while rolling by the deadline in the back of the yard I came upon a U18B with all its hood doors open. I stopped the power and stepped over to the unit expecting to see an FDL, but saw a C series 567 instead! Even the Generator is EMD, but it still retains its AAR type B trucks.

The radiator fan / Eddy current clutch has been removed, and some EMD style fans have been mounted over the radiator with some sort of homemade shrouding. Aside from the dual stacks, and morphidite fan setup, you wouldn't know it held an EMD powerplant if all the hood doors were closed.

Was this commen? I imagine it couldn't have been easy to do. I forgot to note the road number, but it was painted a puke shade of orange.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll remember to take the camera and snap off a few shots.

TxBritt

txbritt wrote:I started working at Econorail's Storage yard today and while rolling by the deadline in the back of the yard I came upon a U18B with all its hood doors open. I stopped the power and stepped over to the unit expecting to see an FDL, but saw a C series 567 instead! Even the Generator is EMD, but it still retains its AAR type B trucks.

The radiator fan / Eddy current clutch has been removed, and some EMD style fans have been mounted over the radiator with some sort of homemade shrouding. Aside from the dual stacks, and morphidite fan setup, you wouldn't know it held an EMD powerplant if all the hood doors were closed.

Was this commen? I imagine it couldn't have been easy to do. I forgot to note the road number, but it was painted a puke shade of orange.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll remember to take the camera and snap off a few shots.

TxBritt

Thats actually a former GE U25B that was repowered with the 16-567 prime mover from an F7. Morrison Knudsen rebuilt a group of 7 or 8 U25B's with the guts from former B&O F units back during the mid to late 1970's for a logging railroad. Externally the units looked pretty much like stock U25B's, but looked much different under the hood. A couple of road slugs built on U25B frames were also built and paired to a few of these units.

Bryan Jones

Morrison-Knudsen rebuilt 5 ex-UP U25Bs (plus 2 U25Bs cut down to slugs) for the Oregon California & Eastern around 1976. M-K called the road units TE53-14E's. Weyerhauser, which owned the OC&E, had another one of these U25B rebuilds on one of their other lines too I believe. Check out this site...

http://www.trainweb.org/highdesertrails/oce.html

Two of them were demonstrators, one the 7602 being the first low nose U25 built. Do you have any other info on their status. I tried to contact Econo rail a while ago but they never got back to me. I live where they operated and work with people who ran them on the OC&E who came to work for the BN when they called it quits. I have home video footage of them on the final turn to Bly and back. Four of them were used that day and they sounded pretty sweet pulling 85 loaded log flats up the 1.5% grade up Bly mountain . I sure do miss em. If anyone has any contact info on them let me know, I have the finances and storage space. I would like to see one of them come home. It would also be nice to see the 7602 be restored back into a U25 again, maybe in UP colors, the red and white GE colors were pretty sweet too.