Approximately 270 employees will remain at the shops and the affected workers are eligible to seek positions at other nearby facilities, the article says.
A source familiar with the matter tells Trains News Wire the furloughed workers include mainly third shift shop workers and clerk positions. The locomotive shops are responsible for repainting and servicing locomotives and are the head shop for the railroad’s GP38-3 and GP40-3 rebuild program. The EMD-built locomotives are numbered in the 2000 and 6500 series and are rebuilt mainly from former GP38-2 and GP40-2 locomotives.
The shops also once managed the SD40-3 rebuild program, but that work has since been contracted to Wabtec Corp’s Motive Power Industries in Boise, Idaho.
The Huntington shops have been profiled in two recent Trains News Wire stories after shop workers painted two locomotives in CSX predecessor schemes. The locomotives included a Chessie-painted Chesapeake & Ohio B30-7 No. 8272 and C&O SD40 No. 7538. The B30-7 was recently delivered to the Lake Shore Railway Museum in North East, Pa., while C&O No. 7538 is headed to the Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society in Clifton Forge, Va.
The Huntington facility is a former C&O facility and is located on CSX’s Kanawha Subdivision located between Russell, Ky., and Charleston, W.Va.
