Union Pacific (the acquiring railroad) has UP1996 in its heritage livery fleet to commemorate this: https://www.up.com/heritage/fleet/commemorative/sp-1996/inde...
Would you surmize that reading a trailing '8' might be an OCR bug which messes a '6' with an '8'?
How does the bot draw in data? does it parse for numbers first? Dates? How does it eval data?
"Southern Pacific Railroad (SP): The SP was a prominent railroad company that operated in the western United States from 1865 to 1998."
It's actually 1996, not 1998. I checked multiple sources.