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A quick note on useage -- ALCO, ALCo, and Alco, with or without the apostrophe in the plural. For many years, Trains' style would be Alco's for both the plural and the possessive, just as it was SD40-2's for both plural and possessive. The reader had to decide which was which based on the context of the sentence. The rationale for the use of apostrophe s for the plural form was that some railroads, notably Pennsy, used a lower case s in steam locomotive classes, notably K4s (s for steamheating), and there was concern that readers would infer that any locomotive class with a lower-case s was superheated. We changed this last year because we no longer have cause to use lower case s for superheated more than perhaps once a year. We now use apostrophe s only for possessive, and just plain s for plural, which we think adds clarity. But wouldn't you know it, a lower case letter is back to haunt us, this time with EMD's new locomotive model, the SD70ACe. SD70ACes is poor, so rather than use the plural form, so we're recasting sentences to avoid the plural form and avoid this problem. We use Alco instead of ALCO or ALCo in the magazine. A quick comment on Alco locomotives. Harold Crouch, former mechanical officer at the New York Central, observed in "Keeping New York Central diesels rolling" in the January 1986 issue that for every penny NYC paid to operate its EMDs, they spent 1.5 cents for their Alcos, and 2 cents for their Baldwins and F-Ms. As he noted, you didn't have to be clairvoyant to figure out which builder NYC was going to favor.
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