No, around 25 years ago, the park decided they did not want it on the property any longer so funds were acquired to move it to down town Houston near the baseball stadium to be included in a new museum. It was at the museum site with plans for the new building to be built around it. But the plans for the museum did not allow space for the entire locomotive so the tender was sold to the Heber Valley Railroad in Utah. The museum plans fell through and what was left of the locomotive had to be moved. It is now setting on the storage lead for the Gulf Coast Chaper NRHS cars but without any tender.
And yet, two more post cards. T&NO F7 pulls the Westbound Argonaut with extra express mail cars for the Christmas rush on December 19, 1954. A cab forward assists two Alco PAs with the westbound San Francisco Overland on the approach to Tunnel 42. July 11, 1952.
An interesting looking site. A lonely railroad outpost of some sort. No communications there, as I do not see any telegraph/phone lines.
A fellow member of the Gulf Coast Chapter, NRHS found this photo that he took in Houston back in about 1970. The SP wanted to scale back the Sunset Limited to 3 days a week but the Feds required that they replace the dreaded Automat Buffet cars with dinning cars again. A few years ago we bought this same dining car from Amtrak and are in the process of restoring it to run on the Hill Country Flyer tourist train out of Cedar Park, Texas. Phil Whitley photo.
Breaux Bridge, LA SP depot, March 1975: I took this picture using my then-new Nikon F2; dredged it up recently to attempt a model of it. There's some rather ornate detail, e.g., the angled wainscotting, the gable windows and siding, and the eave supports.
Sad to contemplate how this depot was once such importance to the community as to have these visual details included, is now in such declining condition.
I'm reading the Spring 2024 Classic Trains and found a short article on the SP's Cab Forwards. I'm far from an SP expert and learned surprising things I never knew. First was their quantity -- Baldwin built 195 of them (!) between 1928 and 1944, all oil burners. Secondly that they were all simple expansion locomotives, thirdly that they operated over nearly all of the SP system and lastly that they were often used in passenger service. Only the 4294 survives, beautifully restored and on display at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.
Had to be. Either that, or the SP would have had to completely reinvent the stoker to make it work. Except that section involving New Mexico, where coal was available. For that district the road had AC articulateds which were very similar, but burned coal, and did not run cab forward.
Hmmm, it ends up that the same story was on line in September 2023. https://www.trains.com/ctr/railroad...ve-articulated-southern-pacific-cab-forwards/
I recall that somewhere in the South American Andes, they did try coal burning cab forward locomotives. They coerced native porters to haul sacks of coal along the boiler running boards from the tender to the cab. I imagine a lot of pour souls were overcome by the smoke while shoveling coal into sacks in the tender or lost overboard in the mountain canyons and tunnels. I suppose a better plan would be to push a "Clear View" tender of some sort that the crew could see over and around.
