Review of Locomotive 2021 Part 2 - "Cowl curtain call"
Welcome to Part 2 of my review covering the Locomotive 2021 issue from Trains Magazine. Like the previous blog post, this one is related to General Electric diesels. It’s not just any GE product; that’s the cowl-body DASH 8-40CM (or C40-8M). First built for Canadian National, the freight-duty C40-8M featured a lot of details that significantly contrast with those on American counterparts. Notable examples include a fully enclosed engine body, a pair of Dofasco trucks, a crashworthy wide nose, the comfort cab, the desktop control console, and the “Draper Taper” rear window design located immediately behind the cab.
Despite their Canadian design, the DASH 8-40CM’s were built at GE’s Erie, Pennsylvania factory in the United States. More interestingly, they were assembled in the same floor space as in the American-designed DASH 8-40CW’s, which also featured the wide nose and were ordered by the Union Pacific. While both models are classified as comfort cab locomotives, the CN units have a four-piece windshield but the UP units have a two-piece windshield. Nonetheless, they both have the same 16-cylinder 7FDL diesel engine, the 4,000-horsepower rating, the desktop console, and diagnostic microprocessor controls.
The history of the wide nose design began in the late 1960’s when Electro-Motive (EMD) debuted the F45/FP45 cowl model and the enormous double-engined DDA40X, both of which had the two-piece “teardrop” windshield. However, Canadian National requested what was known to be called the “North American safety cab” for its latest locomotives in 1973. The very first diesels equipped with that feature were the Montreal Locomotive Works M420 and the General Motors Diesel GP38-2W. Back in the U.S., Union Pacific acquired the first safety cab units to be operated within that country in 1989. EMD came first and delivered the SD60M fleet; in response, GE sold the DASH 8-40CW locomotives to UP by the next year.
In addition to Canadian National, there were only two railroads that purchased the DASH 8-40CM units: the British Columbia Railway (BC Rail) and the Quebec, North Shore & Labrador Railway (QNSL). CN’s first 30 locomotives were painted in red with black and white diagonal “zebra stripes” and its later 25 units featured the North America map blended with the CN logo on solid black paint. All the 26 BC Rail DASH 8’s had red, white, and blue horizontal stripes whereas the QNSL’s small fleet of 3 units were colored orange, yellow, and gray. GE built a total of 84 microprocessor-controlled cowl diesels and delivered them in four different paint schemes exclusively for three Canadian railroads.
In 2004, the British Columbia Railway became a subsidiary of Canadian National, which acquired the whole fleet of tricolor-striped C40-8M’s. While some CN and BC Rail units were repainted, many of them have continued to wear their as-delivered schemes. Unfortunately, the three QNSL diesels were never acquired by CN and were eventually scrapped nine years after the BC Rail merger. As reported in the Locomotive 2021 magazine, 40 (just less than half) of the C40-8M’s are known to still exist in the whole world.
Imagine me responding to a guy who says, “Hey Jerk, cowls are dead!” Well, I really don’t care at all because there will always be everlasting memories of not only the General Electric DASH 8-40CM, but also the General Motors SD50F/SD60F and the Bombardier HR616 purchased by Canadian National, as well as the GM SD40-2F for Canadian Pacific. Hopefully, if a modern cowl locomotive is going to become a museum exhibit, then it will certainly represent the history of North American motive power between the 1980’s and the early 1990’s. Overall, I think the story about the GE cowl freighter is by far my favorite article from the Locomotive 2021 magazine. Draper Tapers forever.
Photo credit: Dave Scott
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