Walthers Mainline Central Vermont GP9

The Central Vermont is oone of the railroads I grew up with, because in my late teens I spent several years near White River Junction, where I saw CV GP9s and Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacfic RS-11s all the time -- even had a chance to ride to St Albans on the Ambassador the year before it was discontinued. Central Vermont models, especially for the later years, have been fairly hard to find. Walthers released a Mainline GP9 in the post-1977 green and yellow not long ago, and while this is after my time railfanning and riding the CV, I'll take what I can get.

The Walthers Mainline brand are bare-bones models and lack many of the details on CV units, includiing sunshades, winterization hatches, rerail frogs, correct horns, bell mounted on the long hood, and spark arresters. Oddly, there is a plow mounted on one pilot, but this is the rear pilot, when the CV units in the late scheme have plows on the front pilot, the long hood end. I'm not sure how easy this will be to change. The shade of green strikes me as just a bit dark, but this is a subjective judgment.

I've added some of these details to GT 4448 above. I covered GT 4448 in a post here four years ago. As I said in that post, the Grand Trunk Railway, which was the US portion of the CN line from Montreal to Portland, ME, was a mountain railroad that did have dynamics on its GP9s.

In addition, CN subsidiary Central Vermont, which was the US portion of a CN line from Montreal to New London, CT, was also a mountain railroad that had dynamics on its freight GP9s. Grand Trunk Railway GP9s 4442-4450 were built for the line to Portland, ME and originally lettered with just the name Grand Trunk, not Grand Trunk Western, on the long hood in the CN green and yellow scheme.

The GT and CV units originally ran interchangeably on both the lines to New London and Portland. However, the GT units, or at least most of them, were eventually sent to the Grand Trunk Western, although parent Canadian National transferred GTW units back to the CV as needed. By the 1970s and 1980s, GTW blue units could be found on the Central Vermont along with their own green and yellow units.

Baseds on the original roster info, CV 4450 would have originally been lettered for the Grand Trunk, but for whatever reason seems to have been transferred to the CV before the other GT units went to the GTW.

As a result, GT 4448 will opeate as a mate with CV 4450 on my layout, something I had planned all along. I'm also hoping to track down the other Walthers CV number in this run, 4447, although these locos seem to have sold out very quickly.

Both these locos are the DCC sound versions. The only change I make to the ESU OEM CVs is to set CVs 3 and 4, acceleration and deceleration, to 0 -- I'm still used to DC control, and I like to see a loco start right away. This is a pure personal preference.