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I’m thrilled to have the Athearn Jenks Blue Geeps come out. They are the power we saw in New Iberia in the years (1961-66) I was still living at home and watching that little MP branchline line closely. They were it, save for a single F unit and single SW1 and S2 I saw at different times. I never saw them run MU, although they may have on the night train up to the NOT&M in Port Barre, which we never saw, we were kids eating supper at home when it would leave around 6 or 7, we could hear it from the house.
When I was first old enough to ride my bike over to what folks called the “roundhouse”, the grey and blue geeps were still around but Jenks blue took over pretty quickly. I seem to recall those engines in both paint schemes being numbered 100-something but I could be wrong, I was 13 years old and didn’t understand the value of note taking.
The most I ever saw these geeps and the dodgers they pulled was through high school classroom windows, running down East Pershing Street at 2 MPH with a flagman walking in front, every day almost I saw this, but of course could not photograph it or run out to see it.
There’s so much I could say about this railroad that only lives in my memory now, and that I wish I’d looked at and documented more closely, but that’s for another time. In the words of the song, “those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.”
