On the first edition of engines of Norfolk Southern, we’ll discuss the sd40-2. In 1972, Electro Motive Division introduced the sd40-2 locomotive sd for Super Duty, 40 for series 40, dash 2 for being a newer version of the sd40. These locomotives were rated for 3,000 horsepower, had a length of 68 feet and 10 inches, a width of 10 feet 3⅛ inches, and a height of 15 feet 7⅛ inches, and weighed 368,000 pounds (184 tons), among the buyers of the model were Conrail which ordered 167 sd40-2 locomotives, Southern Railway ordered 128 sd40-2 locomotives, and the Norfolk and Western Railway ordered 130 locomotives. In 1982 Norfolk and Western and Southern Railway merged to form Norfolk Southern.

In the early days of Norfolk Southern, they owned 258 sd40-2 locomotives, after splitting Conrail with CSX in 1999, Norfolk Southern would acquire 128 of 167 Conrail sd40-2  locomotives, and the total number of sd40-2 locomotives then increased from 258 to 386.

 Between the years 1999 and 2013 Norfolk Southern would slowly sell off the sd40-2 collection, but in 2014 local freight traffic would increase and Norfolk Southern wasn’t ready and so, Norfolk Southern would end up buying 150 locomotives from various leasing companies such as National Railway Equipment Company, Helm Leasing, First Union Rail and so on. Norfolk Southern has rebuilt 31 sd40-2 locomotives to be tier 4 emission compliant and given a special green paint and labeled as sd33eco and an additional 14 were rebuilt into sd32eco locomotives, in addition, 61 ex Conrail sd50 locomotives have been downgraded to sd40-2 standards and are called sd40E locomotives. 

Since 2014 and after all the rebuilds of several locomotives, only 99 of the 536 sd40-2 locomotives remain in service mostly on locals, with an additional 9 in storage, the rest have either been rebuilt, sold, or scrapped. 58 of the sd40E locomotives remain in service and the other 3 are in storage. In June 2020 Norfolk Southern donated 6162 to the Heritage Steam Corp in Kentucky. Despite the continued disappearance of the sd40-2 on the entire Norfolk Southern system, you can still find them in the great lakes region of the system expectly in Ohio usually paired with a sd40E.