Speaking of Early Conrail

[Green_Elite_Cab]

According to numerous photos and the Conrail Cyclopedia site, a number of Lehigh Valley locos went a year or more without being patched, including LV 214 and LV 7640. I had an early Atlas yellowbox 7640 that had been sitting in parts for over 25 years -- I finally got it together, added number board decals and weathering, and installed a DCC decoder. I also got a Walthers LV RS-2 and installed a DCC decoder:


I heard a presentation by a former LV chief dispatcher whose duties on the LV also included determining what locos went into consists and were assigned to trains. He said once Conrail happened, their motive power people got around to asking him why LV got so much more mileage out of its locos than Conrail was getting. He said the reason was that LV kept like locos with like in consists. Conrail, of course, didn't. I get the impression that many Alcos from Conrail constituents wound up in New Jersey and were MUed pretty much indiscriminately until the DeWitt rebuild program got going and the RS-3s went to Altoona for upgrade. I don't know if 214 was ever MUed with an RS-11, but on DCC, these work perfectly in a consist without any reprogramming.

LV 214 got renumbered and patched into 5201. I had planned to do this unit, but my starting model was an RS3, and I couldn't find any LV RS3 patch jobs. There are some complications to using the proto RS2 as well, but its close enough.

If I ever revisited the project, i'd probably go for the Kato model, using an undec shell.