Over the past year or so I’ve posted several of the photographs that Jack Delano shot while visiting the Illinois Central’s yard near Chicago. One of those was a view of the road’s locomotive facility there, and an interesting locomotive set can be seen at right in that image. This was an EMD TR “cow-calf” locomotive consisting of a pair of NW2 switchers, one sans cab, semi-permanently coupled together.

Below is the big brother to that locomotive, the TR1. These locomotives were essentially a pair of EMD FT road locomotives built into a switcher style car body and frame. They were each powered by EMD’s 567 16 cylinder prime mover, rated at 1,350 horsepower. This compares to the TR’s 567 12 cylinder engine rated at 1,000 horsepower. Like the TR, these units are semi-permanently coupled together via a drawbar, and note that they ride on Blomberg B road trucks rather than conventional switcher trucks. These sets were considered as one locomotive, and this pair is numbered 9251A (the cab cow unit), and 9251B (the cabless calf).

Only two of these locomotive sets were produced by EMD, both going to the I.C. in 1941. In this view recorded in November of 1942, the units are just getting broken in, and they weren’t retired until 1966.