My First In-Service Photo Of A Metrolink F125

Progress Rail, which is what EMD now calls itself, has a new model passenger diesel called the F125. So far, the Los Angeles area commuter operator, Metrolink, is the only customer. These locos have been very, very slow to go into service -- the first one was delivered more than two years ago. Subsequent members of the 40-unit order have trickled in ever since. For a while, they were being broken in running in multiple with older Metrolink units, and only recently have they gone into general service by themselves.

The other day I had some business in downtown LA and rode Metrolink to get there. As my train arrived on the platform at LA Union Station, a shiny new F125 was on the other track. I got a shot with my cell phone camera.

So far, the only other F125 I've shot is 913, which I caught a year ago in the grab shot above that I took from a train window. It had just been delivered by BNSF and was sitting in the yard where it had been interchanged. From the dates, you can see it's taken these locos a long, long time to go into service.

These are very attractive units, and the Metrolink scheme on them is also attractive. They're better looking in my opinion than the more common Siemens Charger locos. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that if Metrolink remains the only customer, we'll never see a model, but Metrolink has become very hard to model in the past several years in any case, with unique equipment now in service.