When New Jersey Transit’s locomotive 4207 rolled off the assembly line, the Beatles were still touring, Johnny Carson was just three years into hosting “The Tonight Show” and America had yet to see its first Super Bowl or eat its first Dorito.
Sixty years later, 4207 is still hauling New Jersey commuters where they need to go — making it not just the oldest locomotive on NJ Transit’s roster but the oldest in regular passenger service in the entire country.
It may be an anomaly in American railroading, but not at NJ Transit. The commuter rail agency, the nation’s third busiest, operates more than 20 similar GP40 diesel engines — also called “Geeps” — the oldest of which were originally built as freight locomotives for the New York Central Railroad in 1965. The trains are almost two decades older than NJ Transit itself, yet there is no retirement party on the horizon.
“No matter what, you’re always going to have a GP40 around here,” said Fred Chidester, the agency’s recently retired deputy general manager of equipment. “They are the backbone of our operations.”
Compared with NJ Transit’s streamlined electric locomotives, the boxy Geeps look and sound a world apart. Their utilitarian design features plenty of right angles, and you can hear the howl of a Geep engine a mile away.
That these trains are still out on the rails is, in some respects, an indictment of how far America’s passenger rail infrastructure lags behind that of Western Europe and East Asia, where electrified high-speed rail has been commonplace for decades. Most U.S. passenger trains still rely on diesel power, even in and around New York City. Just one-third of the region’s commuter rail lines and branches are fully electrified from end to end.
As a result, the city’s three commuter railroads must retain substantial diesel fleets, as well as dual-mode locomotives that switch from diesel to electric power, allowing them to run through the tunnels into Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. At Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road, most of those engines date back to the 1990s. Only NJ Transit operates dozens of diesels that predate the moon landing.
“They’re workhorses,” said Dave DeGennaro, NJ Transit’s senior director of quality control. “They were built really well.”
So well, in fact, that they’ve outlived much of the railroad’s newer equipment.
When NJ Transit Rail Operations emerged from the ashes of its bankrupt predecessor railroads in 1983, it inherited a variety of trains — electric “Jersey Arrows” from the Penn Central, Geeps from the Jersey Central — along with the task of integrating a hodgepodge of once-competing railway lines into a unified network.
This meant custom-ordering electric locomotives that could switch overhead wire voltages on the fly, which entered service in the 1990s. State-of-the-art, custom-built diesel locomotives arrived a decade later. The electric locomotives were replaced in the 2000s; the diesels have been racked by reliability issues, and most are scheduled to be retired.
And still the GP40s soldier on.
The longevity of the Geeps, built by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division in the 1960s and overhauled in the 1990s, is a testament to remarkably durable engineering. But it’s also thanks to decades of meticulous upkeep, sometimes by multiple generations of the same family.
“As long as you maintain them, they run,” Mr. Chidester said.
That maintenance involves inspections every three months and regularly replacing the parts that supply lighting, heating and cooling to a train’s passenger cars. Because GP40s are still widely used as freight locomotives across the country, it is relatively easy to source parts.
NJ Transit’s more modern, tech-laden equipment, on the other hand, can be temperamental. “The new stuff is needy,” Mr. DeGennaro said. “The older engines, you really can’t beat them.”
Case in point: The agency’s newer, sophisticated diesel locomotives, built in the mid-2000s, average about 13,600 miles between breakdowns, on par with the ancient Geeps. This sounds impressive until you look across the Hudson; for the electric multiple-unit train sets that Metro-North uses on its New Haven line, that figure is 800,000 miles.
When breakdowns inevitably happen, repairs are made at NJ Transit’s sprawling Meadowlands Maintenance Complex in Kearny, N.J., where, on a recent Friday morning, Geep 4210 was primed for a test run to Newark Broad Street Station after routine maintenance checks.
Gleaming in the sun, 4210 looked regal in its black-and-gold Erie Railroad paint scheme, part of a program honoring NJ Transit’s forerunners.
And as a 3,000-horsepower engine heaved the 300,000-pound locomotive onto the Morristown line, the scene inside the cab, with its spartan spread of analog switchgear, felt like a holdover from the Erie’s heyday. But there was one flourish: a plaque dedicating 4210 to Mr. DeGennaro’s late father, Corrado (known as Dino), who worked for the Erie Lackawanna Railway, and then NJ Transit, for 44 years.
From the platform at Newark Broad, Mr. DeGennaro took in the sight of 4210, snapping a photo before the trip back to the Meadowlands.
“It’s my dad,” he said over the roar of the idling locomotive. “All the positive memories of my father are wrapped up in that engine.”
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