Caltrain Is Selling 20 Whole Locomotives On Its Store Like Giant Pieces Of Train Merch

If you live somewhere between San Francisco and Gilroy, California, and take commuter trains, chances are you’ve ridden on a Caltrain consist before. It’s hard to miss Caltrain’s bold white and red livery and like any good rail line, Caltrain has a merch store. But for the next few months, things are going to be properly weird. Between ugly Christmas sweaters and a really specific soccer ball is an EMD F40PH-2 locomotive, or 20 of them if you’re really counting. I’m not talking about a model or a toy, but 20 entire locomotives for you and your friends to buy. I’m not sure the USPS has boxes big enough for this.

Caltrain is in the middle of a switch to electrify most of its line. That means most of its diesel-electric locomotives, many of which were delivered during the mid-1980s are going to be retired. These locomotives have to go somewhere, and Caltrain is giving extreme railfans the chance to bring one home.

We’ve seen this happen before recently when the Southern California Regional Rail Authority sold a 1992 EMD F59PH locomotive on GovDeals. San Francisco’s Muni Metro and the Bay Area Rapid Transit have also been letting go of their cars, which as the San Francisco Chronicle writes, have become a bit of everything from arcades and clubhouses to Airbnbs. So, people are actually recycling this old rail equipment into new things, which is cooler than seeing them scrapped.

Caltrain needs its old diesel-electric locomotives out of the way so it can charge down the rails on electric power. So, this fall, Caltrain is putting 20 EMD F40PH-2s up for bids.

Pieces Of California Rail History

Caltrain says that as of this year, there has been passenger rail service between San Francisco and San Jose for 160 years. The rail line says it has the oldest continually run railroad west of the Mississippi, too!

According to the Daily Alta California newspaper in 1864, a set of businessmen founded the Pacific and Atlantic Railroad Company in 1851 with the goal of connecting San Francisco to Jan Jose by rail. A route was surveyed and the railroad attempted to get funding from banks in New York and England. The railroad ultimately fizzled out in 1853 after failing to secure the funding necessary to lay down any track. Keep in mind here that California was admitted to the Union in 1850, so this was a quick development.

Still, the public was interested in connecting San Francisco and San Jose. In 1859, the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad Company was formed to see the rail line completed. Caltrain notes that the railroad was reorganized a few times before it finally got enough funding to commence construction work in 1860. Part of what finally got the ball rolling was that this time, powerful industrialists Peter Donahue, Charles B. Polhemus, and Henry Newhall used their influence to help the project move along.

Building a railroad in the area was revolutionary for transportation. At the time, you could take a stagecoach somewhere, but it was likely that its $32 cost meant that you probably couldn’t afford it. Keep in mind that the railroads were cutting costs and getting around labor shortages by hiring Chinese workers and paying them a pittance compared to other labor at the time. That $32 stagecoach ride was more than a whole month of their wages. Then there was the time. A stagecoach ride from San Francisco to San Jose took 9 hours under the best conditions.

Other forms of transportation included paddlewheel steamers, but those were also outrageously slow. So, the idea of commuting from San Francisco to San Jose, a distance of just 50 miles, wasn’t really in the cards back then. Things were worse if you tried to go alone. There weren’t really much in the way of roads back then and fog frequently rolled in from the ocean. So, just getting from San Francisco to San Jose required what’s guesswork at best and you could travel in a direction for hours without knowing if you were even headed the right way.

Caltrain continues that things were dire. California had a ton of gold, but most of that was getting shipped east. So, California counties couldn’t afford to build roads and couldn’t maintain or improved what few were already there.

Caltrain says the San Francisco and San Jose was also a bit ahead of its time. It took three years to build an initial section of track between San Francisco and Menlo Park before the full run to San Jose was fully opened in 1864. That was impressive given the fact that delays occurred due to harsh winters and the Civil War. Caltrain is also proud to note that it did all of its early achievements at a time when the Transcontinental Railroad wasn’t even complete.

The railroad transformed both San Francisco and San Jose. When a trip between the two points would take at least nine hours before, the trains did the trip in just three and a half hours. Even better was the fact that the trains pushed through fog and other obstacles that weren’t easy to overcome before.

Caltrain says that as a result, the San Francisco and San Jose was one of the first rail lines that could be considered to be a commuter line. But the trains did way more than just bring people between the two cities far quicker than other modes of transport. The trains also allowed for the transportation of freight, including agricultural products, and the railroad helped bring prosperity to the region.

The Southern Pacific Railroad purchased the San Francisco and San Jose in 1868 and in 1870, the San Francisco and San Jose, Southern Pacific, Santa Clara and Pajaro Valley Railroad, and California Southern Railroad were all consolidated into one large railroad reporting as the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Southern Pacific would make many of its own changes, including laying down a second track as well as rerouting the line, known as the Peninsula Commute, so to shorten the distance between points and to save overall time in transit. The Peninsula Commute between San Francisco hit its peak during World War II with 26 trains running between the two cities each day with trains often just minutes apart.

After the war, the Peninsula Commute began taking hits from the automobile. A railroad strike in 1946 sent passengers into cars and onto California’s highways. As roads improved and expanded, more people started driving rather than taking the train. Then came the Interstate and over time, the trains lost so much ridership that the Southern Pacific bled cash on the Peninsula Commute line.

By 1977, Southern Pacific wanted out and it was willing to do almost anything to get out of the Peninsula Commute. The railroad was even willing to buy 1,000 vans for vanpools if it meant it could cease service. Ultimately, local transit districts decided to subsidize fares and by 1980, the California Department of Transportation contracted with Southern Pacific to continue running the Peninsula Commute. Caltrain was born and it upgraded operations and by the mid-1980s, it even replaced SP’s old rolling stock with upgraded units of its own.

These Locomotives

I think the best part about these locomotives is how they’re being sold. Caltrain’s website reads:

Own a piece of Caltrain history!
These gently used, lovingly maintained 1985 F40 diesel locomotives could be yours. The historic locomotives come with 40 years of service, and more than 1,000,000 miles travelled. Perfect for your model trainset, train-themed diners, ornamental lawn decor or planter box, unconventional bed n breakfast, or just to show up your overly gnomed neighbor’s lawn.

That’s so funny that it’s easy to think this is a joke. I mean, again, this is on the Caltrain store next door to a pre-order for an ugly Christmas sweater. This whole thing is a giggle. But Caltrain spokesperson Dan Lieberman promises this is real and if you have enough money, you can buy a real locomotive to do whatever with.

Prior to 1985, Caltrain leased equipment from Southern Pacific. One of the problems Caltrain found was that the trains had to be turned around at the ends of the line. Between 1985 and 1987, Caltrain acquired 20 EMD F40PH-2 locomotives and those are the ones coming up for sale soon.

This is happening due to Caltrain upgrading most of its fleet to electric locomotives. This is called the Caltrain Electrification project, itself a part of the Caltrain Modernization project, and Caltrain is doing it because ridership is increasing, leading to higher demand, but also because its locomotives are beginning to reach 40 years of age. The rail line notes that switching to electric will make the line more reliable but also be better for your lungs and the environment because there are no diesel fumes to worry about.

Caltrain says the switch to electric will allow it to run seven trains per peak hour per direction. At first, the switch to electric isn’t going to be full. As it stands, the electric lines will go only as far south as Tamien Station. Caltrain says this is because the right-of-way two miles south of the station switches hands to Union Pacific. So, Caltrain will have to run diesels past Tamien to Gilroy until that part is figured out.

Overall, Caltrain also expects the electrics to handle about 75 percent of its 77-mile system daily needs, with diesels picking up the slack. That’s why Caltrain isn’t selling every diesel locomotive it has. Some of the diesels staying behind appear to be three MPI F40PH-2Cs, which were built in 1998, six MPI MP36PH-3Cs, which were built in 2003, and a pair of EMD MP15DC switchers.

What you’re getting here is a beauty. The F40 was built starting in 1975 by the General Motors Electro-Motive Division. These were based on the EMD GP40-2 freight road switcher but designed for passenger use for what was then a freshly minted Amtrak. The prime mover is an EMD 16-645E3, a 169.6-liter turbocharged V16 making 3,200 HP. These reliable four-axle locomotives have served passenger lines for decades and can still be found riding the rails around places like the Grand Canyon and in Chicagoland.

As I said before, Caltrain has 20 of these, but they are of different configurations. Five of them are built to F40PH-2 spec. These locomotives use their prime movers and electrical alternators to generate head-end power or the power for everything in the passenger cars. To achieve this, the locomotive needs to run at a 60 Hz frequency, which requires the prime mover to turn at 893 RPM constantly. That’s full speed for the prime mover, so these locomotives are basically running wide open at all times, even when the throttle is at idle. If you’ve ever stood next to a stationary F40 and wondered why it sounded like it was racing, that’s why.

Thankfully, 15 of the F40s were built to F40PH-2-CAT spec, which means that a six-cylinder generator from Caterpillar was installed in the locomotive. This generator handles head-end power, allowing the locomotive’s prime mover to rev corresponding to the throttle, rather than running flat out all of the time.

A Few Big Catches

Sadly, none of this matters at this moment. Caltrain says it took on a grant to help get this electrification project going. Unfortunately, a stipulation of the grant is that the locomotives have to be disabled before being sold to the public. Caltrain won’t say what this means, but if it’s anything like what the Southern California Regional Rail Authority did to its surplus locomotives, Caltrain probably windowed the blocks of those mighty prime movers.

You’d think that a railroad would rather scrap a decommissioned locomotive rather than try to sell it to the public. However, Caltrain thinks that these locomotives will end up in the hands of railfans, artists, and others who will find some use for the locomotives that isn’t destroying them.

Sadly, Caltrain doesn’t give us a look into the cabs, so here’s the cab from an older F40:

Now for the bigger problem, as if windowed blocks weren’t going to be a big enough headache. Caltrain is putting these locomotives up for an Invitation for Bids (IFP) procurement process. The railroad says to send it bids through email. Caltrain won’t say how much it expects to sell these for. However, if the auction for the Southern California Regional Rail Authority EMD F59PH is anything to go off of, people are willing to pay $83,000 for a non-running locomotive.

Oh and then you have to ship it, and don’t think you’ll be loading your 135-ton locomotive onto the back of a truck. Caltrain says you’ll need to ship these bad boys by rail and it cannot even begin to tell you how much that will cost. Either way, I hope at least one of these gets saved just as a sweet piece of history. I’m actually a bit surprised to hear that Caltrain isn’t donating one to a museum.

It should also be noted that while this is all a bit silly, there are websites to buy whole, running locomotives and other websites to buy prime movers. So, seeing a locomotive for sale isn’t that big of a deal. What remains a bit weird is how Caltrain is doing it. Maybe, this holiday season you’ll visit the Caltrain store and get that railfan in your life a $50 ugly sweater and maybe a $100,000-ish locomotive to plop down in their driveway.

(Images: Caltrain, unless otherwise noted.)