The barcode engine

#1111, the barcode engine. (Photo by Jack Hughes.)

—The August 2020 entry of MY calendar is Norfolk Southern locomotive number 1111, the barcode engine.
#1111 is an SD70ACe, called the “the barcode engine” by railfans because its number resembles a barcode.
The picture was taken by my brother in April of 2016, and the train is stopped at the Rose crew-change point north of Altoona in Juniata. The train is eastbound on Track One of the yard-side express tracks. As the railroad approaches Altoona, it splits into express and drag tracks.
Altoona had yard tracks galore, and still does somewhat.
Altoona is just east of Allegheny Mountain, where helper-locomotives were added to attack the mountain. Heavy trains still get helpers.
My brother has photographed #1111 many times. It’s in the railroad’s road-power pool.
The train has three locomotives, and the second is an old EMD SD40-2, (I think = hard to tell).
The train, what I see of it, appears to be mixed-manifest, although that train-number, 67X, may indicate otherwise.
My brother keeps track of every train-number, which we got when the engineer called out a signal on railroad-radio — which we’d monitor with our scanners.
With in-the-cab signaling train-engineers no longer call out signal-aspects.
My brother also has crib-sheets indicating departure and destination. If it were 27N, we’d know it was all auto-racks from Wilmington DE.
67X might not be mixed-manifest. But it looks mixed to me.
Often trains run right through the crew-change area, but 67X needed a crew change.
Norfolk Southern has 20 road-locomotives in paint-schemes of railroads out of which NS was formed. They’re called the Heritage-Units.
The barcode engine isn’t a Heritage-Unit, or anything special (there are others), but railfans adopted it.