Railroad Trains for the Soul - GE DASH 8 Demonstrators
This locomotive (a B39-8 demonstrator number 809) features an experimental wide-nosed comfort cab design that was the prototype for General Electric’s North American safety cab. It is known to be the only example of a GE locomotive cab with a three-piece windshield, which is otherwise common on Electro-Motive diesels such as the F59PH, SD40-2F, and SD60M. Also, notice the door on the perfect center of the nose; we don’t see that design on many modern wide-nose diesels, but there are a couple of noteworthy exceptions. In the late 1970’s, GE built ten BQ23-7 units for the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad. They had a boxy cab for crew “quarters” and were painted in the Family Lines System scheme. More recently, Norfolk Southern designed the “Crescent Cab” with its center nose door for the SD60E and DASH 8.5-40CW rebuilds.
GECX 809 was actually born as B36-8 No. 606, the very first locomotive of the DASH 8 series, in 1982. Four years later, the demonstrator was upgraded to a B39-8 and renumbered as 808. The round-roofed cab was replaced by a higher profile cab that matched the same height as the dynamic brake housing directly behind. Finally, in 1988, the unit was converted with the unusual wide nose as mentioned before, and it still exists today in the GECX test fleet as of 2022. After its demonstration tour across the United States, the cab of No. 809 was not quite effective for a production locomotive and was never duplicated for any other diesel. As a result, the GE wide nose was redesigned with a two-piece windshield and sloped edges. This proved more successful for subsequent locomotives, up to and including the Evolution Series.
Although General Electric came first with the safety cab prototype in the U.S., Electro-Motive actually built the very first production wide-nose diesels (designated as SD60M) to be operated within that country in January 1989. Yet before GECX 809 was fitted with the new cab, General Motors Diesel Division (Canadian subsidiary of Electro-Motive) delivered the comfort-cab GP38-2W to the Canadian National Railway in 1973. In the same year, Montreal Locomotive Works introduced the M420 for CN. Moving forward to the last month of 1989, GE was completing assembly of its first production wide-nose model, the DASH 8-40CW. It was numbered 9356 and painted for the Union Pacific Railroad, which ordered the SD60M fleet earlier. While the two-piece windshield was a standard feature for the C40-8W, the Canadian cowl-bodied DASH 8-40CM (also for CN) used the four-piece windshield as seen on both the GMD GP38-2W and the MLW M420. The C40-8M was also assembled in the same factory at the same time as the UP C40-8W. We’ll talk more about the wide-nose design in another blog post soon.
Be sure to check out Trains Magazine’s new Locomotive 2022 special issue, which features two articles about the GE DASH 8 series, “the diesel that dethroned EMD.”
GE No. 606 photo property of:
