Warren Buffet Buys Burlington Northern

[MountainMan]

Is there any sort of industry or branchline at the location where it is parked? If not, and there is a grade nearby, it may be as you suggest a spare in case a locomotive fails just before starting up the grade. Typically the railroad knows exactly how much power to weight a train needs to climb any grade on the railroad. They don't generally add extra power to the train unless they need to move excess power to another part of the railroad, and then they would be more likely to use a light engine move. If the train left the yard with just enough power to climb the hill, and one unit broke down having an extra unit on stand-by at that siding would save a lot of time and hassle. This would be especially true if the nearest yard was quite a ways away from the location. Also it would cost a lot less for the engine crew to park the train nearby, get out of the locomotive and start up the spare and move it to hook up to the train rather than having an extra crew bring another locomotive out in a light engine move to hook up to the train, in which case you now have an extra crew on the clock going as far as that engine needs to go before they can get off and catch another train home.

Not really. A siding and a cross-over nearby. I'll try to capture a Google Earth image of it.

Dang - didn't work. OK - here it is. This image isn't up to date, but the marked siding is where they park it.