And why I like it.... most of us who are interested in diesels have
>seen the Atlas U30C announcement. Even though I'm not a GE lover,
>this is the best news so far in 2003 for me. With every other
>manufacturer banging out duplicates, or ultra-ultramodern, the smoking
>roundhouse-queen U30C is a welcome change of pace.
>
>Of course a lot of people don't like it much... the U30C, while
>produced in fairly high numbers, wasn't a smashing success...
>certainly not when compared to it's contemporary competitor, the SD40
>and SD40-2. A large number of the latter are still in daily, class-A
>service while one would be hard pressed to find a U30C that's running
>at all, much less on a main line major railroad....................
Indeed. Your comments are more than kind. Benign and benevolent perhaps would be a better description. We had five of the execrable things on the Southern Railway along with ten U33Cs. They were our 3800 class. Everyone who had to come in contact with them hated them; not the least of which was yours truly. However, I have plowed this field before, so I will not do it again here. There is more to a model than my personal remembrances of its prototype.
I suppose that a model of this thing was needed, as many of them were produced and railfans and modelers seem to have a special place for GEs. So do I, but it is not the same place.
Although I will never have any model of any GE on my model railway, I can appreciate the efforts of Atlas. I certainly hope this model performs as well as other Atlas locos, and I hope that all the poor, misguided GE aficionados find happiness with it.
....................F>