Brookville BL20GH


The Brookville BL20GH is a road switcher diesel-electric locomotive built by the Brookville Equipment Corporation. The locomotive is designed for both freight and passenger service. Brookville built 12 in 2008 for the Metro-North Railroad. The Staten Island Railway operates four nearly identical BL20G locomotives, built by Brookville in December 2008, in work service.

Design

The BL20GH is a low emissions locomotive equipped with a V12 MTU-Detroit Diesel 12V4000 engine rated at. It has a separate Caterpillar engine for head end power, allowing the locomotive to be used in passenger service for branch line shuttle trains. The Metro-North locomotives are equipped with Automatic train control.

History

Brookville built a single demonstrator for the Connecticut Department of Transportation ; CDOT and the Metro-North combined to order eleven more in 2008, for a total of twelve locomotives. CDOT owns six of the locomotives, which it painted in its "McGinnis" paint scheme, named after former New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad president Patrick B. McGinnis. This scheme consists of a black nose, with a white stripe and an orange rear, with white New-Haven lettering overlapping the orange rear. The first public run occurred on June 9, 2008.
These locomotives are used in branch service on the Metro-North Railroad, including the Danbury Branch and Waterbury Branch. They are used on shuttle trains operating on routes where there is no third rail. They lack third-rail shoes and thus rarely operate into Grand Central Terminal.
The BL20GH locomotives are currently undergoing an overhaul, where they will be rebuilt and reclassified as BL20GHM. All units owned by CDOT will be repainted into a livery similar to the GP40-3H units operated on the Hartford Line and Shore Line East.

Variants

A nearly identical locomotive, known as the BL20G, operates on the Staten Island Railway. Four were built by Brookville Corporation in December 2008. These locomotives lack the head-end power generator and the associated ventilation grates of the BL20GH, and thus they are only used in work train service unless performing a rescue of their R44 EMU's.