I just read a rumor that the 70MACs stored at Alliance are all off lease and are being sold to a railroad south of the boarder. I know a month or 2 ago a bunch of BNSF owned MAC were leased to a Mexican road, so I wasn't sure if this was just a corruption of that news or a new event.
YoHo1975 I just read a rumor that the 70MACs stored at Alliance are all off lease and are being sold to a railroad south of the boarder. I know a month or 2 ago a bunch of BNSF owned MAC were leased to a Mexican road, so I wasn't sure if this was just a corruption of that news or a new event.
I read that 200 will be going south and about the same number of Dash8-40CW are going north to Canada. All of those older GE's and the Macs have been in service for many years and the BNSF has only eyes for GE now. They did replace those older macs with some SD70Ace models, but that ordering book seems to have slowed down.
CZ
CAZEPHYRYoHo1975 I just read a rumor that the 70MACs stored at Alliance are all off lease and are being sold to a railroad south of the boarder. I know a month or 2 ago a bunch of BNSF owned MAC were leased to a Mexican road, so I wasn't sure if this was just a corruption of that news or a new event. I read that 200 will be going south and about the same number of Dash8-40CW are going north to Canada. All of those older GE's and the Macs have been in service for many years and the BNSF has only eyes for GE now. They did replace those older macs with some SD70Ace models, but that ordering book seems to have slowed down. CZ
The only problem with that theory is what Mexican road needs, or can afford 200 SD70MACs? KCSM is running a small number of SD60s, plus the ECOs. Otherwise nothing older than a AC4400CW. The only other possibility is Ferromex. And 200 seems way to many for them.
I asked on loconotes and was told that this rumor came from a very unreliable source. So Make of that what you will.
I heard these SD70MAC are still BNSF and leased to the Mexican railroad Ferromex only on a temporary, short-term basis. I guess once that lease expires the SD70MAC’s will go back to BNSF. The Mexican road probably has an AC-traction loco crunch and needed additional AC-locos to fill in a gap. IIRC, Ferromex has ES44ACs too, which are a decade or more newer than the SD70MACs.
If BNSF decides to retire their former BN 9400-9600 series SD70MACs, I hope some of them can be sold to class 2 regionals, which has already happened with some SD9043MACs. A SD70MAC would look nice in MRL paint and compliment their SD70ACes. Ditto for Iowa Interstate and the Indiana Railroad.
If Ferromex needs locos they can have their GEVO's back seen on last month on BNSF.
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