It was an attempt to keep the MOW dept in ballast. It was thought that if you dedicated some locomotives to the service, that you'd be less inclined to steal the locomotives to run on revenue trains. Conrail selected thier 10 C32-8s and painted them gray to idenify them. The C32-8s were well suited for this service since they had lots of TE, fairly low HP and were fairly unreliable (they were the first production Dash 8s).
Actual results were a mixed bag. They got stolen for revenue trains, anyway, when things were tight.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.