Well, I normally don't model what if's or fooby stuff -- but, after talking with a couple of close friends -- I decided to do more of a should have been. As SP owned only 1 RDC (#10) -- I decided to do would could have been or more appropriately - what should have been: SP #11 -- in Daylight. What are Y'all's thoughts-? Thanks, Wolf
Number Ten wound up being protobashed into a one-way RDC-2 after a collision in 1960. I wonder if perhaps Number 11 might have been an RDC-2 or -3, as there were a number of places where it could have run that would need mail or express service. Number 10 wound up on the NWP. SP could have run an RDC-2 or -3 between San Jose and Santa Cruz. There was a connexion from Sacramento that met the San Joaquin trains. It ran with a T class in the steam days and a passenger equipped SD-7 in the diseasel era. Usually it had a baggage/mail and a coach. SP had better uses for an SD-7 than a connecting passenger train, so it could have run an RDC-2 or -3 on that one. If you are happy with that, and you should be, it is a job nicely done. You could do an RDC-2 or -3, as well. The Daylight paint scheme is not far fetched, as many roads gave their RDCs fancy names. SP's was painted in the aluminum with red stripe car scheme. B&O had two RDC-2s that had the baggage end equipped with a lunch counter and had a special "Daylight Speedliner" lettering. In the mid-1990s, and, perhaps before that, Con-Cor offered an SP set that had two RDC-1s and a -2 in the aluminum with red stripe scheme. The C-C shells are a bit clunky, but they will fit the Kato power chassis with a minimum of work. All the same, a nice job.
The #10 when it resided at the railroad museum in Galveston, Texas. It has since been repatriated to California where it will be restored to running condition hopefully.
That might be a foobie, but I doubt a whole lot of people would care, from looking at it. I can hardly tell it didn't ship that way from the factory. That's a seriously nice paint job!
Thanks, John!! I could see an RDC in PE paint -- that would be a wonderful what if/should have been project. Wolf
I used .080 X .125 cut to a size that looked good to me. I went with 2-1/2 scale feet high. I know, I have seen an article on modeling it, I couldn't find it. So, I guestimated the dimensions. I think the number boards turned out pretty good. Thanks, Wolf
It is difficult to be one hundred per-cent certain, given the angle of the photograph that @r_i_straw has submitted, but it does appear that someone has restored the damaged end of Number Ten to its original appearance. It could have easily been done by using an end from a scrapped RDC-1. Does anyone know the details?
No the back end is still kind of funky, with the end of an Osgood Bradley "American Flyer" car grafted onto it by the Sacramento General Shops in 1961. Here it is back in Sacramento.
Thanks for the photograph. The Sacramento shops always did have a reputation for being "creative". It is no surprise that the task of "fixing" the thing would have fallen to it. .......so it was the end of an old SSW American Flyer car that went onto it, -eh? You can see more of the jury rigging since the thing was flood damaged in Tejas. I did some reading on the thing. It appears that there is conflict as to when SP did the RDC-2 protobash. Some content states that it was before the collision; some, after. The reports do agree that it became one-way after the collision. I read reports, as well, that SP used to have it tow a baggage or baggage/RPO. Using these things to tow cars violated the Budd warranty. This did not stop CRI&P or M&StL from doing this. The towing of cars seemed to cause problems for the M&StL cars. Reportedly, Budd fixed them the first couple of times as a courtesy, but finally told the railroad that "this was the least time". Shortly thereafter, M&StL sold them to C&O. I do not know if this was true, or not; I just read it somewhere. If the towing of cars caused problems for the CRI&P cars, I never read that anywhere. If, indeed, the baggage compartment was added before the collision, I would wonder if towing the head end car caused problems, or, had the baggage/mail/express traffic dropped to the point that a full car was not necessary, so to save wear and tear on the RDC or the cost of paying a crew for the head end car, SP simply added the baggage compartment at a later date. A couple of things worked against this thought. SP purchased the double-decker cars at about the time that the RDCs appeared. Further, the SF Peninsula was one of the last holdouts of SP steam. SP's dieselisation priorities were elsewhere: SSW, the Sierras, Texas. SSW was because SP had stripped the best steam from there upon acquisition and left only the older power. When the diesels first became available, SSW's older power was requiring so much work. Note that FTs, RS-3s and GP-7s appeared on the SSW and not on the SP. For the Sierras, it was a matter of availability. The diesels required far less maintenance than did the cab forwards, which made them available far more frequently. I am not sure what SP's priorities were in Tejas, but diesels went there before they were on the SF Peninsula. Harre DeMoro took photographs of steam on the SF peninsula in its last years. There were all sorts of them there, even cab forwards and F classes, even though the C and Mk classes were better suited to the freight work of that area. The Mt and the GS classes did well on the Peninsula commutes. The Pacifics would have been cheaper to operate except that they were too old. All of the displaced steam went to the SF Bay Area, thus the SP was not going to spend, just yet, for diesels to work that area.
Economic justifications aside, the RDC became available in 1949 while diesels and gallery cars didn't appear on the commuter trains until the mid-1950s, so there was certainly ample time for SP to have opted for the Budd cars.
The bi-Levels were on the drawing board in 1948. Budd had been tinkering with what became the RDC since the 1930s, and, was actually about to get somewhere with it when the war started, which put the whole business on hold. Even after the war, Budd really did not get going on it until about 1947 or 1948. Everything that I ever have read about the RDCs and their development suggests that originally, at least, Budd set out to construct the Ultimate Doodle Bug. Originally, at least, Budd did not intend for these things to run in commuter or intercity service. Originally, the intent was for them to operate on the branches where the gas-electrics ran. What was funny was the NYCS immediately ordered them after their first demonstration on the Boston and Albany and put them to work in Commuter service there. Other roads did similarly. Still, there were others who put them to work initially on low traffic lines or runs, such as NP. Even NYC used them on the low traffic Bay City, Michigan run. In 1956, B&O put them to work on intercity trains. Several authors have stated the B&O was actually making a profit on the train until about 1961, where the train that they replaced was losing money. The early deliveries of the bi-Levels in California did run behind steam. When I was involved in N-TRAK, one of the trains that I used to run was three bi-Levels and three HWs behind the C-C 4-8-4 in black. Wheels of Time had just come out with its bi-Levels in realistic paint, but had not yet come out with the Harriman subs. so I had to use the foobalicious C-C HWs. In addition, the font is incorrect on the C-C black 4-8-4, but, it was all that was available, at the time (Kato's had not yet appeared). The train used to raise the eyebrows of the Scale Rule Richards. Fortunately, there was Harre DeMoro, thus I had more than one of his photographs of P, Mt and GS classes in front of bi-Levels. There were not many Pacifics' working the Peninsula commutes by the time that the bi-Levels showed up, but there were still some on the Peninsula. Mostly they worked freight by that time. The mild gradients of the line allowed large drivered power to work freight. Probably the only place there where the P classes would have been useless on the Peninsula was the Old Line, which had a rather steep (relatively) grade coming out of The City. Before the construction of the Bay Shore Cutoff, SP often had to doublehead the power on trains out of The City. Still, it was likely more the economics that kept SP away from the RDCs rather than availability...............and is not The Almighty Dollar just that?
Love the idea and the foobie. "If only" is something it seems is constantly said about the SP. Unfortunately, SP's RDC didn't arrive until March 1954 and the daylight paint ended in 1950 when the Sunset Limited went into service between Los Angeles and New Orleans. Instead of daylight, the cars were stainless steel with a red letterboard. When the Golden State cars lost their Golden State color scheme beginning around 1953 they were also repainted in the Sunset scheme. I would like to think the RDC would have been more popular if painted Daylight like the one you did.
