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Norfolk Southern Side Rod

(How to avoid getting bored during quarantine, by making Rolling Line liveries)

Norfolk Southern is a major Class 1 railroad in the eastern United States, operating over a network comprising a total of 21,500 miles of track. Their main commodity is coal, but they also operate more conventional local and intermodal trains. One area where NS coal trains are particularly common is the Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania, which includes the bizarre section in West Brownsville where the railway runs through the street.

NS has been in existence since 1982, and was formed through a merger of the Norfolk & Western and Southern Railways. The company took over half of ConRail when it was dissolved in 1996, with the other half going to CSX Transportation. Norfolk Southerns headquarters used to be in Norfolk, Virginia, but the headquarters were switched to Atlanta, Georgia in 2018. The Juniata Shops in Altoona, Pennsylvania are a major maintenance facility for Norfolk Southern. It's also the place where the railroad sends some of their locomotives for rebuilding.

NS's livery is a fairly simple black with white decals. All locomotives (bar heritage units) in the fleet carry this livery, and the fleet itself includes the following locomotive types (amongst others):

EMD GP38-2 (both normal and high-hood)
EMD SD40-2
EMD SD60E
EMD SD70, SD70ACe, SD70M and SD70M-2
General Electric AC44C6M (rebuilt C44-9W's)
GE C40-8W
GE C40-9W
GE ES40DC
GE ES44AC
Progress Rail PR43C (rebuilt from EMD SD50's)
RP-E4 series slugs (converted from GP9's and GP18's)

The number carried by this reskin - 9037 - is that of a real-life Hitachi Side Rod locomotive. Coincidentally there are two other diesel locomotives that also have the number 9037. One of them is a General Electric C40-9W in Norfolk Southern's fleet, and the other is part of KiwiRail's DL class.