In the engine room you walk up several steps to a door that leads to the cab.
Open that door and step into the cab right behind the engineer's seat and you
see the view of the next photo.
This is the control stand in the SDP40F,
BNSF 6969.
I liked these units. Well not these exactly. I can't recall ever
having one on the point. But I had plenty of BN F45s which had identical cabs
except for better radios. I wish all the modern wide nose units had the old
style control stands like this instead of desktops.
The cab from the conductor's side.
The BNSF does not permit these units
to lead any longer because of crew injuries climbing up and down the steep side
ladders to board. The cabs are no longer maintained for occupancy. Even the
toilet has been removed from the nose.
Let's go back into the engine room and walk back along the engine to the rear
of the unit. There we will walk over to the left side of the loco and look up
the left walkway towards the cab.
In the first shot you can again see the
air compressor in the lower right.
Beyond the compressor the smaller
horizontal cylinders are filter housings. A fuel pump and its electric motor is
mounted near the end of the filters. The large horizontal cylinder up at eye
level is the water expansion tank previously mentioned.
Taking a few steps forward up the left side we get the next picture.
The
two red cans are the final fuel filters. They screw on just like the oil filter
on your automobile. There are two fuel sight glasses above them. The sight glass
next to the engine block should be completely full of fuel and show no bubbles
in it. The sight glass nearest in the photo should be completely empty. It is
the by-pass sight glass and if it has fuel flowing through it the filters are
beginning to plug and need to be changed. On the floor midway along the base of
the engine is the turbo lube oil pump.
Finally a fuzzy night shot of MRL's F45 number 390 and a sister at Laurel
roundhouse as I am going to work. That is my power at the right edge of the
picture.
I wrote a short essay about another SDP40F I had in a consist in May of 2000.
If you are not or were not a member of my private Tales From The Krug list then
you might want to check it out. For those of you who are members of my list it
would be a rerun.
SDP40F cowl
unit story
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