Locomotive numbers

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know what the class one railroads will do when they run out of locomotive numbers? Their current pratice is to use four digit road numbers and that only leaves 9999 different combinations. Will they go to a five digit system?
Or do they scrap & retire enough locomotives in a year to free up numbers?
Thanks
Craig

[Anonymous]

NS, as with most roads, never had 10,000 locos in service at one time. If it were to happen, there's no reason why a road couldn't go to 5 digits. Former CB&Q used 5-digit numbers on E units! In 10,000 series methinks.

[oltmannd]

The railroad routinely reuse the road numbers of scrapped/retired locos. They try to avoid renumbering because of cost and hassle of doing so. Even if we got down to two RRs in North America, I don't think there would be more than 10,000 road locos on each, so no need for a 5th digit. UP did use a different mark (UPY) for their yard engines, so they could have two with the same number e.g. UP 3333 and UPY 3333.

-Don

[Anonymous]

I've seen NdeM GE U-Boats numbered in the 10,000's. I would imagine that a US road would 5 didgits if they had to.

[Anonymous]

The FRA/AAR computer that tracks locomotives is set up to accept no more then 4 digits, so if a railroad runs out of number they must use another reporting mark like UP did with the UPY reporting mark and some of there retired units got WP (westen pacific) marks to free up numbers for new units.

gwl
http://photosbygreg.20m.com

[Anonymous]

Ahh.. I read in a book somewhere that WP dropped the letter suffix on it's F units in the 70's because of a computer system.