LOVE this photo! Bonus: Erie heavyweight baggage car. I do enjoy seeing photos of foreign road head end equipment on Rock Island trains. It gives me N scale modeling ideas. Plus, as discussed in another thread...if you have the photo, you have proof that the prototype actually did "run like that".
That looks like a Whitcomb manufactured by CLC built 75 Ton built for Canadian National, but rejected by CN and bought by RI.
I labeled it as a Whitcomb back when I posted it in my Railimages album in 2007. https://www.trainboard.com/highball/index.php?media/rock-island-whitcomb.48763/
Yes, I have to concede this one. The slot cut in the nose fooled me. That's a modification; the original side radiator openings are there, but covered by sheet metal. The radiators also grew up above the hood, shoving the headlight forward. I should have known better than take a Rock Island engine at face value. After all, this is an FT:
Yes it IS a Rock Island boxcar in Rochester, MN in 1998. If you look real closely, you can see it under that paint to the left of the door: Doug
This one could also go in the Beginnings of Streamliners thread. The Texas Rocket, 15 minutes out of Houston Union Station at Belt Junction on the way to Dallas. Number 602 was one of six TAs built for the RI in 1937. Photo: George C. Werner collection.
They were essentially the first F units. But the single V-16 prime mover was a 201-A making Twelve hundred horses, not a 567 that could be rounded up to Fourteen hundred.