I thought I'd caught an SD45

It had been a long drive. I’d been watching the tracks along U.S. 53, searching in futility, but the flash of blue and the hint of motion caught my eye at 72 mph: Train! I pulled off the four lane highway at Chetek, Wis., and started backtracking on a side road paralleling the tracks. Still, nothing, for miles. I know I didn’t imagine the units or the movement. More empty tracks. And then, suddenly, near a frac sand plant, I saw two units in the woods shoving back to a coupling. And that’s when it hit me: SD45 in the lead!

In the space of seconds, I went from the elation of a fisherman who’d caught a rainbow trout to the excitement of a fisherman who’d snagged a giant blue whale. SD45, the brute that packed 3,600-hp back in the 1960s when that was high horsepower, the locomotive that had paved the way for all of today’s high-horsepower units, the mountain machine, was still alive on a shortline in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin.

I flashed back quickly to my youth when SD45s were locomotives in places familiar to me on a regular basis: Southern Railway on the Loops and on legendary Saluda grade near Asheville, N.C.; on the Clinchfield Railroad; on Seaboard Coast Line on the ex-Seaboard Air Line route between Bostic, N.C., and Hamlet, N.C.; and on the Norfolk & Western in and around Roanoke, Va., Winston-Salem, N.C., and Lynchburg, Va. Their flared radiators and 20-cylinder engines exuded power like a bodybuilder flexing his muscles.  On SR and N&W they often ran long-hood forward as they were set up in that most impressive way. But it has been years since they were key components of the major railroad rosters, and their numbers have dwindled. Of the 1,260 built, only a handful remain, most in preservation.  

I scrambled around the car, grabbed the Nikon out of the trunk, and took aim. The blue was that of leasing firm CEFX and the number boards said 3117. Could it be? That’s Southern’s number series for SD45s. The low short-hood said “no,” but I reassured myself that those can be chopped in rebuilding. No. 3117 and its SD40-2 mate continued to drill cars as I declared it time to move on.

Thanks to the internet, I can track down the pedigree of CEFX No. 3117, which, it turns out, is not a Southern Railway unit, but a Southern Pacific unit, SD45, No. 8888, built in 1967.  As it turns out, the almost 50-year-old unit has been rebuilt so significantly that it’s no longer considered to be an SD45 but an SD40M-2. The carbody, however, still speaks to a day many years ago when the horsepower race was in its infancy, when something like a flared radiator commanded attention and respect, and when the baddest thing on rails was the SD45.

Remember, you can read more about diesels like the SD45 in Locomotive 2016, our annual look at motive power. It’s on sale at https://kalmbachhobbystore.com/product/special-issue/loc160901