At the time of the PV&T over, the Delaware & Hudson had ~60 EMD & GE locomotives, including 40(!) GP39s & 12 GP38-2s. The long term plan was to retire/rebuild all of them in favor of 251-powered engines, but that – obviously – wasn’t going to happen immediately.

So since they were staying on the roster, they needed to be classified; the GP38-2s were put into class DL17, and the (almost identical, except more powerful) ‘39s went into class DL17b.

Then the BAR merger brought in a small handful of GP38s, which were dropped into class DL17c.

14 more were added to the class when the Central Vermont was merged into the system, then 22 were added when Groupe I&M was taken over.

The 52 that the D&H owned were stored after the D&H’s purchase of C&NW C628s & CN HR616s, but were reactivated and transferred to the BAR in 1989), and all remained in service until 2011, when they started to be replaced by ILW‍ eco-644 & RS-38 units.

The original dozen D&H GP38-2s (533-544) went to the Bangor & Aroostook in 2001, ran for another 10 years there, then were set aside for remanufacture. One of them (#539) was rebuilt into the RS-38 prototype, and the others were sold to the Diesel Locomotive Pool, which has put them into their lease fleet.