On a sunny Thanksgiving weekend in 1978, Ed Hodges photographed Conrail’s “Clinton Local” at rest behind the Budd Company in Clinton, Michigan.
The train is tied down on the main line, with no crew present. It had arrived from Lenawee Junction, Mich. on a previous evening, and is waiting for the next work day so its crew can start switching.
Conrail is already two and a half years old, and freshly-rebuilt (by ICG in Paducah, Kentucky) GP-8 #5413 is the locomotive. This unit was built for the Reading Railroad in May 1953 as GP-7 #623, and the Paducah shops shipped out the rebuilt unit just a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of the month. A number of Penn Central green boxcars are visible in the train, with a blue caboose on the rear.
Locomotive #5413 was a regular locomotive on the Clinton run for a few months, and later migrated to the Cleveland and then Chicago areas. Conrail retired the last of the GP-8 class on April 11, 1991.
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