Diesels destined for scrap

A frequent question from railfans is why? Why are some diesels destined for scrap?

Why does your favorite locomotive go off the breaker’s yard? Why do some engines get shuffled off this mortal coil while others continue for decade after decade?

There is a multi-part answer to that, and it involves bureaucracy, the economy, mechanical issues, and even plain luck.

The economy

The most obvious reason why a locomotive might go to the scrapyard is simple economics. Prolonged downturns in traffic might render many locomotives surplus to requirements, or a rise in scrap prices may make it viable to cut up already-stored locomotives. Due to accounting rules and best practices, locomotives can remain stored for up to two years after being pulled from active service before they can be sold for scrap or other uses. During this time, railroads will often treat these stored engines as extra power, ready to go at short notice should demand return or the economy improve.

However, if a locomotive remains in the dead line long enough to be fully written off the company’s books, it’s put up for sale. Gone are the days of in-house crews breaking down an engine for the metals — Conrail was the last of the Class I roads to do that, and the practice is now left only to short lines and scrap merchants.

Where the engine goes after it leaves the railroad is, once again, a matter of economy. If the high bidder was a metals dealer, then it will probably be cut up sooner rather than later. If it goes to an operation like LTEX, it may be scrapped, it may sit for years waiting a rebuild and subsequent new life in lease service, or it may wither away to nothing as a source of spare parts for those engines that continue operating. An engine can also be sold directly to a short line or an industrial operation, where its work may continue for decades to come.

Mechanical problems

As a railway’s fleet of locomotives ages, certain units will experience more problems than others. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from accidents, poor maintenance, or even design flaws. For example, the Electro-Motive Division Dash-2 series of locomotives have significantly fewer wiring issues than their older compatriots due to Dash-2’s modular circuitry and Exane wiring, which is more resilient than the wiring formerly used by EMD. As a result, while the wiring in an SD40 locomotive can decay as the locomotive nears 30 years old, the wiring in an SD40-2 of similar age may be in better condition, or at the very least be significantly easier to re-wire. It seems simple, but these factors can often be the difference between a long career as a locomotive, or a career change into razor blades. Similar issues have befallen the General Electric Dash 8 locomotives; they are significantly harder to rebuild/rewire than their Dash 9 successors and are more likely to be removed from mainline fleets as they age.

Additionally, as locomotives get older and their value to the railroad decreases, major mechanical failures can sideline them permanently. While some failures are obvious — like a cracked engine block or major wreck damage — sometimes the final nail in the coffin can be quite small: In July 2023, the Portland & Western Railroad retired the last SD7 in revenue service – No. 1501 — after it developed a simple water leak.

The bureaucracy of railroading

Railroads are, among many other things, a business, and with that comes many levels of bureaucracy that informs (and occasionally hinders) operations. As an example, a locomotive is nominally under the authority of the railroad’s mechanical department, which can decide when it is overhauled and repaired. In day-to-day operations, however, the engine is really under the control of the local yard- and trainmasters who have final say on what work the locomotive does and when. Additionally, a locomotive is also an asset that exists on the railroad’s balance sheet and is subject to the company accountants. Finally, the railroad’s C-Suite executives have full control over the entire railroad and can make a unilateral decision to go around all the aforementioned bureaucracy. And this explanation only covers locomotives that are owned outright by railroads, and not engines that are leased from financing companies.

This all affects the likelihood of a specific locomotive ending up on the scrap heap. Railroads tend to keep frontline power for around 20-30 years, according to Don Graab, former vice president of mechanical operations at Norfolk Southern. After that point, efforts will be made by the railroads to pare down the fleet’s older locomotives. However, in recent years, with the increased focus on short term financial gains, decision-making began to become more unilateral.

Graab said, “Historically, the mechanical department always played a role in what units were stored and what units were sold. For a long time, 12 or 13 years, the interdisciplinary committee that reviewed this and made recommendations of management twice a year at six-month intervals. More recently, they just bypassed the mechanical department, went right to the local trainmasters and said, ‘you know, you got a big yard out there in Decatur, give us three GP38s, just give us three numbers and we’ll scrap those.’ And the bad part about this is it’s just willy-nilly.”

This direct approach to locomotive scrapping goes a long way to explaining why otherwise functional locomotives end up in the hands of scrap merchants like LTEX or National Railway Equipment.

Luck

Sometimes, a locomotive survives (or dies) through the simple luck of the draw.

As noted, a railroad’s bureaucracy (and the various ways it can be side-stepped) will occasionally strike down an engine in its tracks. Additionally, mechanical damage can abruptly sideline a locomotive that otherwise could have kept working well into the future. There are numerous anecdotes of both, but two stand out:

Texas’ Dallas, Garland & Northeastern Railroad had invested heavily into Genset locomotives in the 2010s. These locomotives did not pan out as expected, and quickly became hated by crews. One locomotive in particular — RailPower RP20BD No. 143 — was so thoroughly unreliable and disliked that when it eventually caught fire, a quick-thinking employee is said to have directed firefighters to point their hoses into the locomotive’s generator compartment, rendering the engine a total loss in seconds.

A second example of luck playing a role was cited by Don Graab. “Yeah, well, occasionally there’s been these snafus where this comes to mind with the Norfolk & Western. They saved one last Fairbanks-Morse six-axle locomotive to get to a museum and parked it out at Schaffer’s Crossing, where I used to work, and it sat there for years, and somebody who didn’t know about this commitment to give it to whatever museum got wrapped up and said ‘we gotta get rid of some of this crap’ and sold it off to a scrap dealer. And the museum was like, “what? You promised us that.”

“Things like that happened,” Graab added, “this was a six-axle, 2,400 hp locomotive. I don’t remember which predecessor road it was from, Virginian had them and Wabash had them, but they had cut all the others down into slugs. This one was still there, with the opposed pistons and everything. [It] sat there for about six or ten years and, all of a sudden, it disappeared. That’s a shame.”