“Strange Bedfellows” Less than seven weeks out of La Grange, an SD50, aided by an SD9, with an eastbound OML coal drag for the Curtis Bay piers, skirts the rock face at Relay, where the Old Main Line and Washington Subdivisions converge to use the same ROW. The camera position is on the site of the B&O’s former Viaduct Hotel (razed in 1950), adjacent to the Thomas Viaduct.
CS/C&O SD50 8628: S# 857095-5, built 10/85 CS/B&O SD9 1838: S# 20123, built 12/54
The locomotives are representative of the newest and (if not for the handful of SD7s still rostered at the time) the oldest group of 6-axle units in the Chessie System fleet.
Thirty two years after the fact, I apologize for the (shall we say limited?) view of the SD9, which was due strictly to “photographer error”. Or was it “railfan error”? In my defense, I likely was simply overwhelmed by the prospect of an extra clean Chessie unit, which occurred only when factory-fresh. Or so it seemed.
