L&N/Seaboard System U25B's

Does anyone know about the Louisville & Nashville GE U25B's? Well L&N ordered 27 GE U25B's during the time General Electric made them (1960-1965). They were delivered in the Louisville & Nashville scheme at the time and some got repaints and when the Family Lines System Scheme came out L&N was very quick to get most (but not all maybe I'm wrong) U25B's into this scheme. They remained in this scheme until they were retired (1980's) and some made it to Seaboard System and painted over the "L&N" reporting marks and left just the number or a SBD stencil and 1613 got the Seaboard System paint scheme and only 4 made it to Csx and they scrapped 3 of them around 1987-1989 and 1 is perserved in a musuem in Tennessee.

Here are some pics (L&N Scheme)


(Family Lines Scheme-Csx)

Hello Mr. M...

Your spot on with information, in fact you practically have posted all there is to know about the L&N U25B.

We have one model of the U25B available, however it's a Burlington Route engine & does have a few bugs to work out.

RRMods has a new line of GE U-boats & they are due out this year, one is a U25B & they will probably do one in L&N, but it's so far down the pike right now I won't even post a link.

I visited the TVRM over the years whilst #1616 sat there, slowly deteriorating & dying of neglect.

That locomotive was in running condition when they got it, but now it needs a generator.

Here it is on it's way to the new owner in PA, who sent it to Oak Ridge, TN...

I don't think we owned it. I'm sure we would have run the heck out of it if we did and it was operable. Our General Foreman is an L&N guru-fanatic and if it was ours it would still be here.

Phantom-hood....

Your right, it belonged to the B&O museum.

Practically all the time it was at TVRM, there were many other projects that were going on...the Army Geeps, the #610, #4601 & a half-dozen others.

Plus, it's a given that the "EMD vs GE" debate put an expensive u-boat endeavor on the side track.

I learned it was fully operative & FRA certified upon arrival at Chattanooga from the Dinner Train Engineer at the SARM.

It was also the last operative U25B in the CSX fleet at the time.

But I would drive to the TVRM on Sundays when the place was closed & my dog & me would sit in the locomotive with my scanner & "play choo-choo."

They took the conductors seat out to make more room for visitors, so it wasn't really fair for my dog.

At times I wish I had took a can of wax & done the whole locomotive, it does look like the yellow nose was waxed but I hold myself responsible as someone who could have made the dude a working model, usable on trips to Trion....especially after it seemingly disappeared.

I figured when the B&O Museum got it back that since the finish had deteriorated over the years they would repaint it to a B&O Capital paint scheme, then I found out they didn't have it, so scrapper or industrial seamed the only end for it.

But its owned by a private citizen under the reporting marks of Vintage Locomotives, Inc(VLIX), as are most all the locomotives at SARM.

It was located right at the K-25 building, but I saw a picture of it the other day so it was moved where you could photograph it....

They're doing demolition of K-25, hauling it away in covered containers, on spine-cars & 89' flats painted green, so the motive power stays busy by day & a contractor shunts cars around & leave them at Blair for interchange to the NS.

Blair to Wheat is about 7 miles, a short ride for a dinner train, I wished they would move over to Cookeville, we have a beautiful line to ride at least as far as Carthage, from Monterey, TN.

The latest L&N scheme in Trainz is the plain grey carbody with yellow alpha-numeric fonts, no pin-stripe. Even with a full yellow nose it looks like crap next to the pin-stripped styling...when it gets a bit weathered you can't even read the number on the cab, let alone the hood-side, but some folks saw only that & there may be someone that likes it...somewhere.

I'm staying out of the content creation discussions until I see what I want is released.

Someone, possibly Backyard, was making L&N 1616. TPR has a forum thread with a pic of the "u25b_body_a.tga" file painted in L&N's super-pale gray. As far as I know, it wasn't released. I wasn't planning on doing an L&N reskin for this reason and because it looked better than what I could probably do with it.