General Electric’s U30C
Up in the north woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula sits the last serviceable U30C — LSI No. 3009, dead and drained outside Lake Superior & Ishpeming’s diesel shop in Eagle Mills. This locomotive and its cousin, LS&I C30-7 No. 3073, had been filling in on ore trains when not enough LS&I AC4400CWs were available to handle the varying number of trains operated each day.
During the colder months, the pair would sit shut down inside the warm shop, making their activation easier if needed and saving fuel by not idling outside. But the call to pinch-hit on an ore train may never come again, with their fate most likely sealed by the arrival of three additional AC4400CWs leased by LS&I earlier in 2023.
LS&I No. 3009 was the last U30C in service. Built in 1975 for Burlington Northern as No. 5303, the unit was acquired by LS&I in late 1990 from BN and was part of a fleet of almost two dozen U30Cs listed on LS&Is roster over the decades.
Introduced in the late 1960s by General Electric, the U30C was its best-selling U-boat model with 600 copies built over a decade of production. Burlington Northern was the largest purchaser ordering 181 copies with the model first arriving in 1972 as new coal business was beginning to take off for the railroad. Most BN U30Cs would be equipped or come from GE with radio-control equipment to operate as head-end or remote mid-train helpers on long coal trains over many of its grade-intensive corridors.
This winter, No. 3009 will sit cold outside the shop, its call to duty most likely never coming again. If that’s the case, it will mark the end of an impressive 57-year run for General Electric’s U30C model. And No. 3009 will have finished its career the way it started, in heavy tonnage bulk service.
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