Just Got Traded to a New Team!

When the photo of this locomotive was taken, the new owner of the railroad company was the Burlington Northern Railroad (BN). However, the paint scheme on the locomotive on the front of this post card is that of the Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP), which the BN recently purchased. The Northern Pacific Railroad was an important American transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the Western United States, from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest between 1864 and 1970. The Northern Pacific was headquartered in Minnesota, first in Brainerd, then in the state capital of Saint Paul. It had a tumultuous financial history; the N.P. merged with other lines over a century later in 1970 to form the modern Burlington Northern Railroad, which in turn merged with the famous Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway to become the renamed BNSF Railway in 1996, operating in the western U.S. It has a long and interesting history, and this website does a very good job of presenting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Pacific_Railway The locomotive on the front of this post card is a General Electric (GE) U33C model. It was a modification of GE’s U30C locomotive, which began production in September of 1967. The U33C (produced in 1968) was one of GE's most powerful six-motored road-switchers, and one of the last models made by GE using the “old technology” before they developed the more technologically advanced "Dash 7" line. The U33C was General Electric's first six-motored model to sport a noticeably flared rear radiator; needed to handle the unit's 3,300 horsepower using the 7FDL16 prime mover. This model of locomotive sold 275 units by the time GE started to produce Dash 7’s. These two websites can fill you in on the details of the U33C https://rapidotrains.com/ho-scale/diesel-locomotives/u33c-u36c.html and one of my favourites https://www.american-rails.com/38213.html

The post card was published by Railcards.com