We had a great time today. We took a tour of the Houston Ship Channel (which is free) and saw a lot of stuff. We had done this several times before with the boys when they were Cub Scouts. Houston is a pretty big port. The boat cruised down the channel and we got a pretty good look close up at a lot of merchant ships. As you can imagine, there is all manner of ships along the channel. It being a very large refining area, there are a lot of tankers. The most interesting to me was this one. They are loading a locomotive into the hold. I would guess that is a fairly dicy operation. Somebody somewhere is going to get a brand new locomotive.
That locomotive looks like an SD40-2, a model produced by EMD, the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors. Details here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD40-2 .
It is far from brand new---it was built in June 1980 as BN (Burlington Northern) 8108. It still has BN colors. Later it became FURX 8108. "FURX" is "First Union Rail," which I know nothing about. This data comes fromhttp://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locopicture.aspx?id=19885 .
