Like any good railfan, I've got a couple of railroad calendars scattered throughout the house. The April photograph from the Norfolk and Western Historical Society's 2007 calendar is captioned thusly:

RB-3, the daily through freight from Roanoke to Bristol passes Dublin, Virginia in charge of GP9 No. 903 on a March day in 1978. Of historical significance, it was here that Union General Crook with 6,500 troops arrived on the property of N&W's predecessor, the Virginia & Tennessee, May 9, 1864. They destroyed the Dublin depot and water tank. Crook then set an eastwardly course to Central Depot (East Radford) sabotaging the New River bridge, water tanks, crossties, and engine wood. Learning that Confederate troops from the east were en route by V&T trains, the force, by then at Christiansburg, retreated to West Virginia on May 14, 1864.

RB-3 is powered by three early EMD GP units (903, 756, 909) with two more modern EMD units trailing in the 15xx and 2xx(x) series. According to a roster I have laying around,the first locomotive is an SD35, while I can't identify the second one. A leading two on a four-digit road number usually indicates an ex-Nickel Plate unit, but I can't tell. Another possibility is one of the N&W's GP35s, which would also make sense for a through train of this sort.

All but one of the locomotives---our mystery unit---are painted in the 'F6' livery, distinguished by the sans serif 'NW' plastered on the flanks, nose, and rear of the unit. The mystery unit looks like it is painted in scheme 'F4' or 'F5', both of which used the so-called "Pevler blue" as the base color, with lettering in Dulux Gold.

Given the train symbol system currently used by the Norfolk Southern Railway, it is likely that train RB-3 passed into history some time after the 1982 merger. A quick glance at Joe Shaw's data on trains in that area doesn't reveal an immediate successor to RB-3, alas.

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I'd planned to start this feature several years ago, but I lost the note to do it and only recently found it buried in a giant WordPerfect document that had miscellaneous blog notes.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 01:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 I had easy time reading your blog. But it seems now it's over . Man, this post sucks. I hope at least the next one won't be.

Posted by: Don Tolep at April 06, 2008 02:53 PM (rAsIa)

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