Description
Railroad Short Name: MILW
By the late 1940s, the engines on the Milwaukee Road’s electrified Rocky Mountain Division were nearly three decades old and tired, and diesels were the wave of the future. Management was intending to pull down the overhead wires and dieselize the entire division. Then along came a big electric named Little Joe, and the wires stayed up for another quarter-century.
The Joes were actually built for another customer half a world away, Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad. But by the time they were ready to deliver in 1948, the Cold War had frozen sales to the Soviet Union, and builder General Electric was stuck with twenty 5,500 hp locomotives designed to run on 3,300 volts DC — most built to Russian 5’ track gauge. As the Milwaukee Road was one of the few American railroads with overhead DC power (at 3,000 volts), GE offered the entire order, including spare parts, to the Milwaukee at the fire sale price of one million dollars. At least one unit, painted in GE demo colors, was tested on both of the road’s electrified divisions in 1948 and acquired the nickname “Little Joe” after Joe Stalin.
Locomotive Features:
- Intricately Detailed, Die-Cast Metal Body
- Die-Cast Truck Sides & Pilots
- Metal Chassis
- Metal Handrails and Horn
- Metal Body Side Grilles
- (2) Handpainted Engineer Cab Figures
- Authentic Paint Scheme
- Metal Wheels, Axles and Gears
- (2) #158 Scale Kadee Whisker Couplers
- Prototypical Rule 17 Lighting
- Directionally Controlled Constant Voltage LED Headlights
- Lighted LED Cab Interior Light
- Illuminated LED Number Boards
- Powerful 5-Pole Precision Flywheel-Equipped Skew-Wound Balanced Motor
- Motorized Operating Pantographs
- Onboard DCC/DCS Decoder
- Locomotive Speed Control In Scale MPH Increments
- 1:87 Scale Proportions
- Proto-Sound 3.0 With The Digital Command System Featuring Passenger Station Proto-Effects
- Unit Measures: 12 3/4″ x 1 3/8″ x 2 7/16″
- Operates On 18″ Radius Curves
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