This Space for Rent

Branchline locomotive

hfgx 1
Very vaguely based on profiles drawn by Joshua Moldover, via The Railroad Paint Shop,
which were then mashed into an I420 by me @ my dining room table

Herrick Feed & Grain #1, an I420 that HF&G purchased in 1992 when their original power (an ex-ICG SW-7) couldn’t keep up with the increasing amount of grain being shipped out of the Herrick elevator and the increasingly large grain cars that were being used to ship said grain.

It’s a standard RSX51-E420 sans dynamic brakes & with two optional features (the most obvious are the extended corner steps, but it also has an air conditioner built into the crown of the cab roof.)

HF&G’s railroad is an artifact of the ICG & N&W abandoning many of their secondary lines through Illinois. When the N&W bailed on their ex-NKP line through Herrick HF&G found themselves faced with the horrible possibility that they’d have to truck everything down to Vandalia or up to Pana for loading, and in that case the local farmers would just cut them out of the deal and go directly to Conrail or the C&EI which I’m sure would be fine except for one particular local grain elevator. So they wrangled state funding and bought the Nickel Plate to Ramsey, then the IC down to the interchange with the Vandalia Railroad (just north of, you guessed it, Vandalia), leased an ICG SW-7, and started running their own unnamed railroad.

Traffic didn’t vanish, but instead increased, so in 1992 they partook of some canadian content when they bought the one-spot from the MTRR/Iberville Locomotive Works. And there it works 30 years later, slowly accumulating miles on the 10 mph at best IC & 30 mph at best Nickel Plate.