What appears to be an Omaha Orange and Pullman Green Great Northern Railway EMD SD9 in 2017 actually is a BNSF Railway unit that had been built in 1959 for Chicago, Burlintgon & Quincy subsidiary Colorado & Southern. For several years, BNSF has assigned Great Northern “GN” reporting marks to some older diesels generally assigned to yard service.
17199-10
Scott A. Hartley
Question: I’ve seen ex-Santa Fe SD45-2s and BNSF Railway SD9s in storage with reporting marks for GN and not BNSF. What do the reporting marks GN stand for on these old BNSF locomotives? — R. Hahn, San Dimas, Calif.
Answer: The reporting mark GN came from the Great Northern Railway, one of BNSF Railway’s predecessors. Great Northern merged with the Northern Pacific; Spokane, Portland & Seattle; and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy in 1970 to form Burlington Northern, which then merged with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe in 1996 to form today’s BNSF Railway.
Large railroads often retain the reporting marks of their predecessors and use them to organize their locomotive rosters. Entire fleets of locomotives may be re-numbered to “make room” for new orders so that all locomotives of the same type are numbered in the same series. — Tyler Trahan
