RSC2m picture of the day
I believe this is a (re)builder’s photo of #578 at the Alco works in Schenectady. I don’t know for certain that it is, but if it was a picture taken by the Milwaukee Road it would have been taken at the Menomonee River shops, which don’t have that background no matter which way you look in the valley, the paint wouldn’t be quite so clean after being shipped across country to Milwaukee, and that strip of light-colored gravel in front of the track certainly looks like it was set down there to reflect a flash up into the undercarriage of any locomotive that was sitting there, and that wouldn’t happen unless you’ve got a lot of locomotives you want to photograph.
So my headcanon is that this is a builder photo, taken just after 578 was rebuilt into the platonic ideal of a diesel road switcher and before it was shipped back to the Midwest to make me into an Alco fanatic at an impressionable age.