Search the Community
Showing results for tags '2069'.
Found 1 result
-
In the early 1950's the United States Army Transportation Corps (USATC) was considering what would happen to an enemy railroad if another European war broke out. If the native locomotives in said enemy country were destroyed or rendered inoperable (as they likely would have been) what would pull the US military trains on their soil? The answer was not easy, as many countries have different gauges, loading clearances, brake types, and couplers. The USATC decided on specific set of guidelines for it's Military Road Switcher (MRS) and waited to see which companies would offer the best design. American Locomotive Company (ALCO) beat out Electro-Motive Division (EMD), and won the contact. ALCO produced 83 locomotives, which sat unused until ~1970 when the Pentagon decided their plans no longer required the capture and use of an enemy railway network. These 96 locomotives (including the 13 EMD prototype ones) were either sold, sent off to various Army or Navy installations, while many were scrapped. One of the ones not scrapped is US Army 2069, which was acquired from the US military surplus program in 1993 by the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, Missouri where it remains operational to this day, periodically shuffling historic items around the grounds. The LEGO model of the 2069 started life as @SavaTheAggie's much larger 8-wide version of the MRS-1 type built in the color scheme of the Texas State Railroad. I modified the hell out of it since purchasing instructions in 2014 - among other things, I changed the colors to black with yellow railings and slightly shortened the frame and long hood. The model was slimmed down from 8-wide to 6 for the frame and 7-wide for the cab, while the hoods remain 5-wide as on the original MOC. You can buy instructions for Sava's original model here at Brick Train Depot. The middle axle of each of the locomotive's bogies slides to-and-fro for traversing switches and curves. Here we see the long hood of the engine. The real world US Army 2069 locomotive from the Museum of Transportation, as seen late last year. (It appears the loco bumped into something a some point, as I don't think the plow is supposed to look like that!) Thoughts?