Nice site with lots of great photos. http://www.railroadmemoirsbycrowner.com/photos/atsf/atsf/index.html
thanks for sharing! great pictures. i wish the sant fe was still the santa fe....i grew up on the main line on the santa fe's dublin, texas sub...
Thanks for the pics, I grew up near the Winslow, AZ sub and spent a lot of time railfanning from Gallup, NM to flagstaff, AZ. Visited Winslow, AZ yard many times as well ad Diablo Canyon near there. brings back lots of memories, After Bn absorbed the SF, the rules around the yard changed and I lost my permission to take pics in Winslow. BN employees were a rude and onery bunch. Haven't been back in years. I wish SF was still in exhistance and BN dead in the yard somewhere else.
Madam Queen waiting on a siding in Ricardo, New Mexico. March 1943. Jack Delano Photo, Library of Congress collection
The few Sante Fe cabooses I remember seeing were all running cupola forward. Was this the norm for the Sante Fe?
All the pics I've ever seen confirm that. And it stands to reason, if the purpose of a cupola is to serve as a vantage point for keeping an eye on the train.
A quick survey of the photos in my collection seem to indicate about a 50:50 split. I don't believe the railroad had any standard direction. Perhaps they just hung them on the train in whatever orientation they found them and did not figure it was worth their time to turn them one way or the other. Or the different crews liked them in their own preferred direction and had them turned if possible.
Another photo taken by Jack Delano, probably on the same day as the photo posted a few posts above, in March of 1943, this time in Laguna, NM, is from a caboose with the cupola toward the rear. You can see the smoke jack which would be more or less in the center of the car.
I seem to recall that from somewhere. However, I would think, other than the novelty, what would be the point of spending so much on a locomotive like that? A monster 10 coupled driver beast would not be welcomed on any class-one railroad or even most tourist railroads. It would pound the rails too much. The UP with their monsters is able to suck it up and repair things and consider the PR benefits outweigh the extra maintenance. I remember one of the 3985 trips through Houston years ago just destroyed an interchange curve they routed it through to get it to a display track next to the Astrodome. They were lucky to make it through without derailing while they crawled around it.
The pic of caboose 1579 shows that cartoon of on the side " Watch out for Axy Dent", but look at the upper cupola window-something has smashed thru it!