Built by General Electric between 1966 and 1976, the six-axle, 3000-h.p. U30C locomotive was General Electric’s alternative to EMD’s SD40 series. In that ten year time frame, GE built 600 U30C’s for a wide variety of operators. The largest customer was the BN, with 180 units compared to the US DOT, which purchased a single locomotive for their Pueblo test facility. Detroit Edison and Kaiser Steel might have been the most unique operators to purchase the U30 (DE receiving 11 and Kaiser with 5). The Kaiser Steel U30’s hauled ore trains from mine to mill in California’s Eagle Mountain, while the Detroit Edison locomotives were assigned unit train duties from the coal fields in western Pennsylvania to DTE’s generating station in Monroe, Michigan. By the late 80’s, most U30C’s had been retired, while a handful remained in operation for second hand operators.

Features:

• Adirondack floating bolster trucks with or without bearing caps as appropriate per railroad
• Coupler pocket designed to accept AccuMate Proto-couplers
• Golden-white LEDs
• Antenna detail where appropriate per road name
• Realistic die-cast underframe
• Five-pole skewed armature motor with dual flywheels for optimum performance at all speeds
• Separately-installed scale windshield wipers, metal grab irons and fine scale handrails
• Directional lighting
• With or without nose headlight as appropriate per railroad
• Non-operating cab roof-top beacon detail where appropriate per road name
• Detailed crew members
• Marker lights with separate lenses
• Snowplow
• Separately-applied drop steps
• Recommended radius: 22"

ANALOG (DC) OPERATION FEATURES:

• Please note that the Atlas Quantum Engineer will NOT operate an Atlas Gold Series locomotive equipped with a LokSound Select decoder on an analog (DC) layout. However, the sound and lighting functions of the LokSound Select decoder in the Atlas Gold Series U30C locomotive can be controlled by an easy-to-use basic DCC system
• Also note that on a DC-powered layout, a DCC and sound equipped locomotive (such as the Atlas Gold Series U30C) CANNOT be consisted with another locomotive that does not also have both DCC and sound. (This statement does NOT apply to DCC-equipped locomotives operating on a DCC layout.)

Sound Functionality Features (Gold Models with ESU Sound Only ):

Over 20 sound effects are available, including engine start-up and shutdown, prime mover sounds through all eight notches, bell, air horn, air compressor, dynamic brakes and more.
There are 16 user-selectable horns, 2 user-selectable bells, and 2 user-selectable synchronized brake squeals. Manual and Automatic Notching modes with the ability to change modes ”on the fly” are provided for true realism.

DCC OPERATION FEATURES:

• Supports all DCC-programming modes
• Flexible mapping of function keys F0 to F28.
• A total of six DCC function outputs are available
• Follows all NMRA DCC standards and recommended practices.

Note: Due to the higher starting voltage required to operate the sound system, it is not possible to MU a non-sound-equipped loco in DC (analog) mode