New Units at West Colton.

[Ericmopar]

Mmmmm, I can still smell the paint.
There are some fresh Alcos in the background.
I think these are probably new units,since they still have, I think, the "L" windows.

FreshSPUnits.jpg

[BoostedFridge]

Nice pic! These were the locotrol 'leaders'. The remote control equipment took up most of the additional space in the 'snoot' noses.

[jmslakings]

My favorite locomotive of all time. You could hear a 45' coming from miles away. That's how we used to railfan. All we had were our ears and ABS signals. These young railfans today with their fancy CTC signals, scanners and laptops. Cheaters!! Great picture Eric.

[Bananarama]

You could hear a 45' coming from miles away.

You sure could!

Some of my earliest memories of SP was when spending weekends at Saugus Speedway near Valencia, CA (it was still used as a race track back then). You would hear quite a drone for 15~20 minutes before the train would appear from the canyon, passing just above and outside the raceway fence toward LA (obviously bypassing the Palmdale cutoff). Most of the time it was SD45s and SD40s, but once in a while you would see the 45-2s and what a terrific show!

[Ericmopar]

I wish I knew how to do skins. I know in later years S.P. was getting ratty, but through the 60s and 70s things looked a lot better.
BTW these are apparently SD40T-2 unit with an extended nose.

We almost never saw anything but EMD units around the East Bay Area, I've been surprised to learn that Colton had a much larger variety of power on the S.P.

[GSkid]

Well I'm partial to SP's filthy looking mountain grade units than the clean units. I like clean locos....for a minute.... then my next thought is, let's put these things to work and get them dirty. I think it's comes from the old school mindset that the sign of a very hard worker is the one with dirty hands packed with grime underneath their fingernails. SP exemplified this mindset the way they beat up and worked their locomotives hard on steep mountain pass routes. They were long, heavy and slow trains with lots of engines and the loud scream & rumble of EMDs (before locos started getting muffled by government noise pollution regulations) that could be heard miles away.

I have an open question for Hack cuz I think he grew up in the greater Los Angeles area (although anybody can chime in if they know the answer)....

When I was a kid, I have a memory of my father bringing me to a rail hump yard once.... complete with speed retarders on the tracks. My memory of it is pretty fuzzy but I think I recall there was an elevated yard master/hump yard control tower near it and maybe even a vehicle bridge that crossed the width of the yard (although I'm not positive of that last one). It was the mid-seventies ('75 or '76 I'm guessing). I wanna say it was packed tightly in an industrial area cuz I don't recall any open space around it. My hunch is this was probably somewhere in the LA basin near downtown. I wanna say it was most likely SP or even UP. Could of been Santa Fe for all I know cuz I have no recollection of the locomotive that was pushing the long line of cars over the hump. I was only age 6 or 7 at the time.

Anybody got a clue?

[Bananarama]

IIRC, the only hump yard in the area is at Colton.

[Ericmopar]

I don't want them clean, but I get tired of SP engines looking like they belong in a scrap yard. Variety is what I'd like.

This is more indicative of what I saw as a kid in the Bay Area.

[GSkid]

Thanks Hack.

If there was no other hump yards at all in the LA area in the 1970s, I suppose I have to accept that it was SP's West Colton yard I saw. It just doesn't fully match up with my memories and that's frustrating. That's the problem with fuzzy memories from childhood.

Those will do Eric....

but I do like them dirtier too .. or "scrap yard" dirty.


Found some interesting SP photos...







That isn't a photoshoped pic. It was somehow painted wrong only on it's right side during a re-paint.The infamous "Sufferr'n Pacific" name is right! Their locos were beaten hard!

[cnwfan]

SP Taylor Yard in Los Angeles had a hump... and pedestrian bridge access from San Fernando Road. Spent many a Sunday afternoon watching sets of SD7's pushing cuts of cars over that hump. Also, SP had a small hump at the City of Industry yard. They had a couple of yard jobs that worked the hump with pairs of SD39's. There was no public access to the hump. The best I could do was a dead end public road at the beginning of the yard's east tail track. Many times, the hump job would be cuts out A or C yards to the tail track in order to access the hump.

[Bananarama]

I forgot all about Taylor, Howard. Thanks.

[GSkid]

SP Taylor Yard in Los Angeles had a hump... and pedestrian bridge access from San Fernando Road. Spent many a Sunday afternoon watching sets of SD7's pushing cuts of cars over that hump. Also, SP had a small hump at the City of Industry yard. They had a couple of yard jobs that worked the hump with pairs of SD39's. There was no public access to the hump. The best I could do was a dead end public road at the beginning of the yard's east tail track. Many times, the hump job would be cuts out A or C yards to the tail track in order to access the hump.

Dude... you are a lifesaver for my sanity. Figuring out where this hump yard was has bugged me since childhood. Hack had me second guessing my memory and it was driving me nuts. The area scenery surrounding the West Colton yard was not matching my memories nor was the hump yard itself. So I was VERY reluctantly conceding to Hack's recollection.

I Googled images of Southern Pacific Taylor Yard and a huge BINGO went off when I saw this picture.... because I CLEARLY remember watching from this exact vantage point (BTW... Do you happen to know from where these are photographed from?)....



Here's the same shot from the 1960s....



And the surrounding area also matches my memory. THANKS Howard!!

[cnwfan]

Both of the above pics where shot from the pedestrian overpass, looking railroad east. To the right was the scale tower, the car shops, and finally the engine facility. The pedestrian overpass was for railroad employees to get from the RTD bus stop on San Fernando road into the yard. Back in the 70's, and even into the early 80's, you could go on the overpass and the railroad wouldn't bother you. Today though, it's all gone. Here's a photo looking from behind where the above photos were taken. It was taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera, so the quality isn't that great. Both SD7's once had boilers, and the lead SD7 has a Mars ash can signal light. The Mars lights rotated in a figure 8 pattern, where as a Pyle signal light had a circular sweeping pattern.

taylor_hump_0279_800.jpg