Most puzzling is that EMD had already designed a SD70ACe for Russian Gauge networks, featuring a cab derived from Australian exports. While the design existed for years, it only was put into production in 2024, for a new coal mining project in Mongolia.

The EMD SD42ACe - aka TE3250 - is the product of a series of very strange circumstances, leading what is a unit in a domestic EMD carbody to ply the rails of the former USSR for the first time.

Many ALCO units found long careers after being repowered; the USSR was no exception. TEM1 first-generation switching locomotives, from the late 1970s on, were rebuilt in Astrakhan with the same, inline-six prime mover of the successful Czech T.669/CHME3 series. This called for a higher long hood.

NZR's DJ class were, arguably, the strangest locomotives on that network. These Bo-Bo-Bo machines were built by Mitsubishi of Japan in the late 1960s, as part of a growing effort to phase out the last holdouts of New Zealand Steam.

Commonwealth Engineering's CE618 was one of the rare occasions an Alco-engined machine missed. Unreliable from the start, a popular rumor is that they were built by Comeng using leftover Alco components from their previous licensee closing up.