Watching an EMD CF-7 Fuel Injector Swap

About a month ago I took a ride north to spend a little time on the Grafton & Upton Railroad in North Grafton, MA.  It was a rainy, gloomy early May day, so photos out on the road would be so-so – and the kind of rainy day that wouldn’t yield dramatic photos, just pretty boring, flat ones.  And I only had a couple hours I could spend in the area, so I wouldn’t make it that far out of town by the time the crew got their train together and headed out of the yard.  Luckily something else was happening inside the yard – something that I have yet to photograph, or even watch.

So, as you can guess from the title of the post, the railroad was doing a fuel injector swap as a part of their CF-7s regular maintenance.  I figured with the so-so weather and my limited time in the area, it would be best for me to stick around the yard and watch and photograph a portion of this process instead of doing my usual chase from North Grafton to Hopedale.

Not long after getting set up, the fun stuff continued where G&U Operations Manager Tony Roman started doing the work on each power assembly of the EMD 567 prime mover.  The process was a set of pretty straightforward steps – remove the fuel supply and return lines, remove the rocker arm assembly, remove the injector, put in the new injector, replace the rockers and finally replace the fuel lines.  Not much else to say except it was pretty cool to see some of the behind the scenes work that keep these big machines rolling down the tracks.

All the photos are below – as always, enjoy and feel free to leave comments here or up on Flickr.

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Thanks for looking!
Tom