Goodbye high short hoods: Norfolk Southern's former Southern GP38-2 roster dwindles

I wasn’t surprised last week when Blackmon Auctions announced it is selling off 50 Norfolk Southern high short hood GP38-2s built in the early 1970s. They’re great, versatile locomotives; they’ve been well maintained; and they’re valuable in today’s shortline and regional railroad market as those railroads snap up good power. The earliest of the units were built 44 years ago, and that’s plenty of time for NS to get its money’s worth for them. NS, which has seen its traffic take a big hit from weak coal demand and other a dearth of other commodities moving, would, no doubt, welcome the cash.

 Having grown up in Southern Railway territory, high-hood Geeps were an everyday part of life. Electro-Motive Division built 2,222 GP38-2s from 1972 to 1986, and SR bought more than 250, all of them with the high short hood. They hauled locals, all of the branch-line trains dodging kudzu, switched yards and outposts, and were no strangers, in four-unit blocks (never three, and never mixed with six-axle power; that was a no-no on ever-efficient SR), on the main line in charge of manifest trains. They were the diesel equivalent of author Ed King’s Southern’s K-class 2-8-0s, which he described in Southern Railway Historical Association’s magazine, TIES, as “Everyday Ks.” And they were everywhere, too: A work train in south Georgia around Albany, you’ll find Geeps; switching smelly chicken feed on a hot July evening in Gainesville, Ga., you’ll find resilient Geeps; nosing around Stearns, Ky., on a Dolly, local parlance for a local, and you’ll find ever-loving, diesel-fuel sipping, sure-footed Geeps.

 The years have seen some units go into rebuild programs, but for the most part, GP38-2s have been wandering around the system, doing what they were built to do, for all these years. But they’re getting harder to find. When I wanted to find an image to illustrate this post, I had to think about the last time I crossed paths with one. I had to reach back to 2011 and a chance meeting in Wrens, Ga., with No. 5141 on the point of a local and in the lead with a GP50 and an SD40-2. I’m told she’s in storage now with other sisters, waiting for her future, more action, auction, or rebuild.

 I doubt that I will see another high nosed GP38-2 in NS paint, doing the company’s retail business, meeting the customers on industrial spurs, and rounding up cars to take back to the yard. I may be wrong. They could be around a bit longer. But if not, I salute them. They were good horses.