Guest post by Frederick Simon.
“Power That Endures | A Reflection on the EMD SD40-2 and SD40T-2”
There’s something about that badge—the worn “GM Power” plate, its sky-blue enamel fading, its rusted rivets etched with the quiet resolve of decades of honest work. It’s a relic, but it’s more than that. It’s a signature, a promise from another time. A promise of power that endures.
I miss the days sitting in those spartan, squeaky seats of the EMD SD40-2s on the Washington Eastern Railroad, left hand resting on the automatic brake handle, the other working the throttle. Out there, in Eastern Washington, where the wind bites like a saw blade and the wheat fields ripple like a green ocean in spring, those old beasts were my constant—as they were for every other hoghead that worked the “CW” line. The SD40-2 wasn’t just another locomotive—it was a workhorse. 3,000 horsepower that came from that near-indestructible turbocharged, two-cycle, 16-645E3B coupled to an AR10, feeding those horses to six D77s. And that unmistakable sound. You know it. You’ve heard it. Right? There are no words sufficient to give that sound its due. Not to mention the equally distinctive silhouette—those “porches” on either end big enough for the crew to set up some lawn chairs and a barbecue to cook up some Grade-A meat just right. And we did. I can still smell the diesel exhaust mingled with the Kingsford charcoal, a delightfully commingled aroma for any train buff railroader. Wink-wink. It didn’t get any better than that.
But I digress.
Fact is, they were “SDs” in the truest sense of that proprietary nomenclature—“Special Duty”—though they would wander off onto GP territory branch lines and heavy yard switching duties more and more as newer iterations arrived from EMD. Until today, some 50 years later, a few still hold on at Class Ones, where their ranks—once in the thousands—have been decimated by progress, emissions regulations, and just plain old age. Those that have managed to survive “planned obsolescence”—an ironically General Motors suits buzzword—have found new homes on regionals and shortlines, though even there they are losing ground—and fast. The trio of ex-UP (one née-MoPac) I teamstered at the WER are long gone. History. Replaced by more fuel-efficient, more powerful, and climate-friendly GE Dash-8s.
But before I get ahead of myself, I also have to make mention of that equally indubitable SD40 iteration. Back eight-some-odd years ago, while working the Scoot Trains on the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad (later the WER), I had the rare privilege of working with a lone SD40T-2—an outsider, one of only five Cotton Belt remote snoots at that, a ‘tunnel motor’ built for climbing the Sierras and Rockies, yet plying the rolling, wind-scoured plains of Eastern Washington. The low-slung air intakes, designed to gulp cooler air as they crawled up unforgiving grades in the long tunnels with hot black exhaust accumulating and no place to vent, seemed out of place in the open sky, but that machine didn’t care. She just worked. Stubborn. Reliable. She remembered her purpose—all 418,000 pounds of her. Weight that didn’t show on her physique but when it came time to pull, well, that’s when you knew her extra pounds would hold traction and march your ass right up Deep Creek, no questions asked.
The SD40-2s on WER were no different. Built for a world of steel, strain, and grain, they took to the rails like old prizefighters—bruised but unbeaten, shaken but not stirred. I ran them through snow that buried the right-of-way right up to the cab window, coaxed them over grades where they dug in like the stubborn mules they were, each throttle notch like flipping the bird in the face of gravity. I learned to trust their temper, their myriad acquired ailments, their idiosyncrasies, and, most of all, their predictable surge of power when I opened the throttle. Even on bad rail, they were steady thanks to their HTC trucks. And when you’ve spent enough hours in the cab, feeling the rhythm of low-joint jointed rail beneath you, you begin to know your locomotive—not just in its specifications, but in its soul—all of its steadfast 3,000 horsepower and nearly 90,000 pounds of tractive effort.
But it isn’t just the numbers. It’s that old “GM Power” badge—the one in the photo—on the control stand, faded but defiant. A reminder of a time when locomotives were built to last, not just to meet a budget or break budgets as today’s new locomotives do. A reminder of those days on the WER, of the lone tunnel motor—and a pair of kin SD45s—on the Eastern Washington Gateway, of the quiet certainty that came with putting your trust in electro-mechanical harmony incarnate that never lied.
I miss those machines. I miss their blunt honesty, their pulsing, turbo-whine-growl in the crisp morning air, the way they seemed to shrug off time itself. And when I look at that badge, I remember—I remember what it meant to be part of something that endured. It wasn’t just a brand. It was a promise.
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