In 1968, the Milwaukee Road bought 5 FP45s as new power for their remaining mainline passenger trains, but when Amtrak took over in 1971 they were moved to freight service, where they were beaten to pieces by deferred maintenance as the Milwaukee Road slowly disintegrated.

This unit (Milw #1) had an electrical cabinet fire sometime in the late 1970s, and was off the roster and sold to Chrome Crankshaft by the end of 1981, and that’s where ILW came in; they wanted a test frame they could use to check reconditioned prime movers, and something like an FP45 was almost ideal because it had a huge engine compartment as well as a large and empty compartment (where the steam generator and aux water tank used to be) that could be set up as a monitoring & recording equipment bay. And, happily, Chrome Crankshaft had just the rolling hulk parked in the to-be-cut line at Silvis.

When 462 arrived in Iberville, it was stripped down to the frame, had a new prime mover cradle (the old EMD engine mounts were cut out, a new base that could hold an engine/generator sled was fabricated), electrical cabinet, cab, and monitoring/recording bay put in, then put into service as an ILW prime mover evaluation locomotive.

It’s nominally a 3200 HP engine (the first prime mover in it was a 251E-16) but has had prime movers from 1000 to 5100 HP fitted for evaluation & break-in testing.

As of 2023, it’s being used as a generalized testbed for both ILW and Portland’s diesel work.