Union Pacific's 8-car Costa Mesa Local, which hasn't served Costa Mesa in decades, heads south on Metrolink's Orange Sub, on which it has trackage rights from Control Point (CP) College (named for its proximity to State College Boulevard) in Anaheim to just south of the Santa Ana Transportation Center, a distance of about 6 miles, where the UP diverges back onto the UP Santa Ana Industrial Lead once again. For a few months, the power for this train has been a single unit, rather than the two back-to-back Geeps it formerly used. And those two got replaced with UP "GP40M-2" 1529, wearing UP's "urban" paint scheme (aka: graffiti, or tagging).
UP 1529 is the former Southern Pacific "GP40R" 7294. And its heritage gets complicated, as this is the second SP 7294.
The first SP 7294 was built by Morrison-Knudsen from CSXT GP40 6707 (ex-SBD 6707, ex-SCL 1552, née-SAL 637), and released on January 25, 1991. SP 7294 was wrecked and burned in a wreck in Proctor, Arkansas, five months later, on June 20, 1991, and its remains arrived back at M-K on December 29, 1991, with M-K subsequently scrapping it on April 28, 1992.
But, before scrapping it, in February 1992 M-K built a replacement SP 1529 (I'd like to think because M-K's management felt badly, but that's not how things work in this country). SP 7294 (2nd) was constructed on the frame from CSXT GP40 6811 (ex-SBD 6811, née-L&N 3015), with a carbody created from an anonymous donor GP40 (the records here must have been unclear, as all the references only mention the frame donor).
Naturally, a few years later, when the SP was merged into the Union Pacific August 11, 1996, this locomotive acquired yet another new owner. It was renumbered UP 1529 on August 4, 2001.
