Ottawa Valley Railway F-750 #1575 in LT&L tricolour paint

In late 2024, the Parsons Vale purchased the Ottawa Valley Railway from Genesee & Wyoming so they could have a connection between the Huron Central/Algoma Southern & the rest of the railway (the G&W was happy to forward traffic, of course, but the Parsons Vale was not a reliable traffic generator for the OVR, and the bird in the hand of $100 million now was more appealing than the promise of trainloads in the future.).

As is traditional, the OVR came with a huge pile of EMD power (and as lagniappe a quartet of MLW M-420s), most of which wasn’t actually functional because the G&W moved all of the OVR’s more modern power to other G&W properties and replaced them with a pile of marginal at best units.

The M-420s, which had been sitting in a dead line in Mattawa, and a pair of FP7 cab units were immediately sent to ILW to be remanufactured, while the rest of the roster stayed in service until they failed, at which point they were either scrapped or sent to ILW for remanufacturing.

  • Copyright © 2024 by Jessica L. Parsons (orc@pell.portland.or.us) unless otherwise noted
    Sun Jan 07 16:34:48 PST 2024