In an effort to cut costs... Union Pacific has ordered a single John Deere Locomotive and is running it thought it's paces as a distributed power locomotive on the line running through the Sierra's.

Ok, I'll bite. Is this a photoshopped snapshot? Is the tractor just parked between two railcars? I can't believe that little tractor could be used to shuffle cars around in a yard. As a side note, the Mt. Washington Cog Railway's homebuilt diesels use John Deere engines.

Looks real enough to me. Lots of industries and shops come up with unusual ways to move railcars around. One plant in my area pushes them around with a front end loader, using the bucket, which leaves big dents and gashes in the car ends.

Or you can do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__y4SFh93dc

The OP's photo reminds me of the "road tractors" that used to be used to switch the waterfront industrial trackage in Baltimore:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/02/44/6c ... 14b630.jpg

Just do it the old way! I have done this with loaded 100 ton stone cars.

PRSL2005, Now that's impressive! I've seen some of the older guys where I work using this technique to move dead trucks (Pry bar to the wheel). Never thought you could do that with a rail car!

Archimedes understood the power of the lever.

Getting a car moving is not the issue, stopping it could be. I have seen wheel loaders with various devices used to hook to couplers either mounted to, or in place of the bucket. Most had some way to supply air to the car and vent the brake pipe so things didn't get out of control.

I never realized how easy it was to move a rail car until I had to do it by hand one night. I used to deliver centerbeams to a lumber yard and in order to take the empties back to interchange we had to pull them out of the yard, push them up the hill about a hundred yards and roll them past the loco. One night it was windy enough that the gusts were blowing the car up the hill. In order to get it to roll down the hill I had to grab the bulkhead and push it. Never in my dreams did I ever think the wind would push a car up hill. And this was maybe 25mph gust.

Empty centrebeam or bulkhead flats are like sailboats.

CN runs a daily "unit train" of lumber empties from Chicago to Prince George, BC (symbol M347). It uses the most fuel per ton of any train on the railroad.

I’ve used the manual car mover pole to nudge a car along. It’s much easier than you might think but a very slow process. Inches at a time. The only difference from the photo is that we don’t stand within the gauge.

There's a specific item called a "car mover" which looks all the world like the thing in the photo. It is a lever, but with one side shaped to a wheel's curve, and a clever little mechanical advantage device so pushing down the handle cause the wedge to move upward with less arc but more force.

That really looks like one, except it is painted shiny black and has a varnished wood handle, whereas if you look in any museum, real car movers are rusty and with cracked gray wood handles.

Pushing a 100T car with a car mover: Against you is the weight, but *for* you is the roller bearings, which IIRC start much easier than a plain bearing.

I have pushed 20T cabooses around by hand. A plain bearing gondola with 4 of us. Further, an A-4 sized speeder once dragged two roller-bearing cabooses out of a river valley, and when I saw it, it was *haulin'*. A larger A-8 speeder also pulled back a Plymouth locomotive in the same breakdown incident.

Video of a car mover being used: https://youtu.be/7W8c_jMVYAs