It’s the Canadian content we all crave
Template(s) drawn by Joshua Moldover, via The Railroad Paint Shop
By the time 1980s rolled around the MTRR’s Iberville shops were starting to get a reputation for being able to rebuild old Alcos into the functional equivalent of what Alco might have been producing if not for being dead – not the high horsepower units that MLW was producing, but they’d take an old locomotive and update it to a suitably-sized 251ed machine with everything else reconditioned and updated to fit.
Which meant that when the shop crews had a wild idea for how to update a PV&T locomotive the rest of the maintenance department would just avert their eyes and leave them to it; in this case, crew complaints about the last two LT&L rs-1s had reached the point where the railroad needed to either retire the units or upgrade them to MLW-style wide-nosed safety/comfort cabs, and the shops expressed their extreme enthusiasm for the idea of doing the rebuild themselves.
So. A MLW rs-1 + the cab of Amtrak sdp40f #578 + some metalwork to fill in the length gap between a rs-1 cab + short hood and a sdp40f cab and #362 was good for another 40 years of service (still with the original 539 tuned up to a whopping 1100 HP for those branch line trains & switching jobs where too many HP was wasteful excess.)