Wow! A Cabforward

way cool....

V.

Sweet!

Is this a colour print negative?

its a digi photo of a print, taken with insufficient light, although the print is already kind of that sepia effect. the original was taken with a 40s or earlier era, all metal box brownie. no lens adjustments, just point and hope you've got enough light. original was probably on kodachrome 25, or whatever it was we had available locally for color film in those days. the original negative is long gone. when we got the prints and negatives back from the drug store, half the pictures i had taken were gone. this was the only semi-good one of the engine that survived. being 9 years old, i had taken several of the coaches and the crowd of railfans in front of them. i had almost forgotten to get a good picture of the engine itself. (i called locos in those days "engines", maybe that's what the guys on the railroad called them, i don't remember for sure why). there were lots of railfans taking lots of pictures that day and on the previous when it went east to reno. i sometimes wonder what might have became of all the pictures THEY took. which i'm certain many were much better then mine. i was very lucky to be able to get this one clear shot, without too too many people standing in front of it to see it at all. i think it was when they were all back on the train and it was ready to leave. it was probably the last shot on the roll of film too. my dad was working the station in colfax that day. i had watched go east the day before from, you see that hill on the left, our house was one of several that were located, just to the left out of frame.

they hadn't seen much service since around 54/55, pretty much nothing steam on the sacramento devision had, but most were still servicable. then in 57 they torn down the roundhouse that had been home to them to make room for the expanded diesel shop, that was when they started scrapping all of them. in less then a year they were all gone, except the one that was plinthed in front of the depot in sacramento. which is, i think, the one that is in the state railroad museum in sacramento. i don't know if that is the same as this one, i don't remember the number on it, but this one pulled the last train that was pulled by one, over our hill from sacramento to reno and return. and with NO diesel helper! just this one engine and rather a long train filled with railfams.

each cab forward was replaced by four f-units. as the f-units aged, four became five and sometimes six.

Very awesome!

Oh my! Did You know there's a similar Cab Forward on display in the Sacramento Railway Museum? If one makes a big enough donation to a understanding Docent, they'll even let one climb into the tender space and take photos of the equipment in there.

yup. see my reply to mti above. been there mucho times. where the i-5 onramp cuts infront of the depot, used to be a much larger parking lot. that's where it had been plinthed. along with the c.p.huntington. when they had to be moved for the ramp construction they were, i think, stored in the unit shop, that used to be on the other side of the station from there. then, during the time i was up in oregon, the railroad musium got built. i came back down here in 87. in 90 they had a 10 year aniversary for the railroad museum. several of the people instrumental in getting the railroad museum built were members of a railfan group i had belonged to.

This is awesome!

At first I didn't comprehend the photo. Thought it was a photoshopped clipping from a magazine. ('D'oh! ) But looked again, read the description and I am- well, quite impressed!

the cab forwards had a better view for the crew. I wonder why they didn't catch on.

well one reason is that with the firebox also near the front, right behind the cab, they could only burn oil, not coal.

visibility wasn't the reason for the design though. tunnel 41 (second in length only to moffet), was, (along with our 50 miles of snow sheds, from the balloon track at the gap, (emgrant gap california, near where nyak lodge is on the freeway) all the way to cold stream canyon, coming into truckee.).
exhaust from high powered engines pulling long heavy trains through long tunnels were more then a little hazardous to the crews. so sp had a huge fleet of them. what most other railroads did that had long tunnels on their summits like that, was to electrify, just the division where the tunnels where. when diesels came along, most took down the wire. they did this rather then adopt the cab forward design, because they had nearby or on line sources of coal, which was more practical for them then converting to oil would have been. that is until the diesels came along, with their much lower maintainence, and thus manpower, requirements.

at that, it took three of these to move our typically 125+ car freight trains over our "hill" (2.6% ruling grade, if i remember correctly, or close to it, which doesn't sound like much, and isn't to a car, or even a trolley, but with that much mass of freight it more then is. actually one of the steepest on a class one main line in north america). one on the point, one 40 cars back from the head end, and a second helper, 20 cars ahead of the caboose. after diesels replaced them we still used mid train helpers up until very recently. occasionally i see that we still do.