@vash44 posted:Sad news indeed. Was hoping to see the IC across the finish line.
How many units would it take to be made? Hopeful for another run one day and can campaign for it then. I do appreciate the consideration for it to be made Scott!!!
While 2nd runs are never guaranteed, it has been fairly typical these days that once people see the quality of the first run a 2nd is requested. Since the tooling is done, it is possible to do 2nd runs should enough people agree on road names.
IC is a tough one. They were an early purchaser of the SD40-2 in 1975, but only purchased 4 units total. I personally found that surprising during research of this unit. The question that hasn't been answered yet and will become evident within the next 24 hours is how many total SD40-2s from this run of locomotives share the same phasing as the IC version? That may factor into it coming back to life if it can get up to at least 20 orders.
While SD40-2 phasing variations in many cases are minor (aside from the long short hoods found on ATSF and SP or the high short hood on NW, SOU, & NS), there are a lot of spec changes over the 12+ years this locomotive was in the EMD catalog. I'm in the process of rationalizing all of that now to create a factory friendly project where there are the smallest amount of tooling changes while also being prototypically authentic to each road. Not an easy task as I'm quickly learning.
Lesson learned from the GP7/9 project is to select road numbers related to specific phases of production first so there is an actual photo for each unit that will be produced. Add to that modifications made from successor roads like BNSF, UP, and others and tracing road numbers back to the as-built road number and now we have a very fun puzzle to resolve.
I'm excited for the high hood NW version even if I am changing my order over to Feromex. Go figure.
