A few weeks ago, I managed to snag a pair of MTH BNSF GP30's off eBay. Turns out they were from another Forum member, which I always like. As the self-appointed Information Minister of the Isle of Denial, I had no choice but to change them back to ATSF. OK, seriously, I didn't really care as I wanted a pair of Santa Fe GP30's and I figured I could just change out the cab numbering and remove the reporting marks easily enough.
In doing research trying to find the original numbers, I discovered that the units were actually referred to as GP30u's as Santa Fe had upgraded the units. From what I've been able to find, it looks like the work was done in Cleburne, Texas. So I've decided that I'm going to change them out to match the GP30u's from whence the BNSF units came. The long-term plan is to relocate the horns to the engineer side of the cab, add a warning light, fix the pilots, and install Kadees. Ultimately, the plan is to run the non-powered unit as the lead unit since the lighting additions will be easier to manage. I'm planning on running the lighting on batteries rather than track power.
We'll see how far I can take this.
Here are the units as I received them. Forum member "Stangerdude" had already corrected them to their BNSF configuration by relocating the horns and adding air conditioners.
Masking and painting over the reporting marks and numbers.
Masking removed
"Corrected Cab Number". Note that I've designated the shop location "San Bernardino" for this unit. The other one, going from BNSF #2436 to ATSF #2736, will be labeled for "Barstow". I chose the locations because I live in San Bernardino and "Cleburne" wasn't available. A prototype note on #2736 is that it was one of the units that had been painted in the "Kodachrome" scheme aka "Shouldn't have Painted So Fast" and was repainted back to the Blue/Yellow warbonnet.
