To Pinkepank

UP 8512 and 8526 at Albina Yard - Portland, Oregon

Before Jerry A. Pinkepank's Diesel Spotters Guide came out in the mid Sixties, diesel fandom was in the Dark Ages. In the railfan magazines you would still see captions like "Alco 1500 H.P. Roadswitcher," instead of RS-3. Getting a copy of the DSG conferred power. With the tool of the spotting feature, I could now tell a GP-7 from an GP-9,  just from looking at a single set of louvers. Later, with the help of sources like X2200 South, I began to learn how to tell apart the different phases of a single model. This sort of thing definitely appealed to my obsession with detail.

When I snapped the photo above of the two UP EMD 6000 H.P. monsters, I was just focused on getting the shot. It was not till later, looking at the projected slide, did I begin to notice the spotting features of the two units, which are actually two different models. 8512 is an SD90MAC-H, built in March of 1999, while 8526 is an SD90MAC-II, built in June of 2000. It looks like EMD's engineers kept busy with modification to the design of SD90s. I won't spoil it for you, but there are many spotting features between the two models to be seen.