Santa Fe railroad engineer J.W. Edwards and conductor George E. Burton comparing time before pulling out of Corwith railroad yard in Chicago for Chillicothe, Illinois. Jack Delano photo, March of 1943. Library of Congress collection.
The 1882 Canyon Diablo bridge. The California Limited in the first pic. The 1900 bridge and the Scout. The much more confidence-inspiring 1947 Canyon Diablo bridge. The Scout's replacement (El Capitan).
That bridge is at a remote spot. My wife and I took our rental car there in March 1997, accessed by a rough road owned by the railroad I assume. Numerous times, I had to exit the car to move larger rocks aside. Our rental cars sometimes get difficult tours of duty. We'd seen warbonnets all day, but when a train arrived, it had nearly all BN power. I did get better shots though, just not with the bridge.
Built by Baldwin in 1909 for passenger service, the Santa Fe also had a pair of 4-4-6-2s, 1300 and 1301 with the largest driving wheels ever applied to an articulated. They were rebuilt into Pacifics in 1915.
I remember seeing that locomotive in Edwin Alexander's American Locomotives c. 1950 that my Dad gave me for my birthday in 1967. (With it, he showed me how to determine steam locomotive wheel arrangements. I still love the book.) It reads that Baldwin used fifty rings of high carbon steel, riveted at their inner and outer edges to form a bellows. Cinders would work their way into the bellows assembly and it'd burst on curves. The book also reads that experimentation with reengineered bellows was worked, but without success.
The bellows was an earlier attempt, numbers 1158 and 1159. They didn't last long. But then, neither did 3322-3324. The later ones may have had that too, just with the cloth added outside to keep the cinders out. http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/flexmallet/mallet26.jpg The bellows weren't expected to hold much more than atmospheric pressure, probably just the smoke and heat on the way from the flues to the reheater. But they couldn't even hold that for long.
My book also has a photo of this monster 2-10-10-2, one of ten built 1911. They were built from existing 2-10-2s matched to ten new low pressure engines by Baldwin, who also supplied the turtle-back tenders. The 3000's didn't pan out and were rebuilt into 2-10-2s between 1915 and 1918.
Unlike their other Mallets that got cut in half, these ten produced twenty normal 2-10-2 types. These Mallets had oversized, inefficient Jacobs-Schupbert fireboxes, so they reused boilers and cabs here, smokeboxes and pilots there. They cut them in half and made two locomotives of them.
I believe it was the Cotton Belt that tried trailer on flatcar service way back in 1930, long before TOFC was an acronym anyone ever used. It didn't go anywhere. The Santa Fe introduced it in 1952, and it has been with us ever since. They said it was all about special door-to-door handling. But in the beginning, not so much. Mechanical refrigeration dehydrates the air. If you live in a hot, humid climate, that's what you want your air conditioner to do. But if you're a lettuce grower, you really don't want to ship in a railcar that will dry your produce out and make it turn brown and wilt. Produce shippers were a strong force in railroading in those days, and most roads catered to them. Especially California roads, which certainly included the Santa Fe. They resisted mechanically refrigerated reefers stoutly. They were militant about it. They boycotted railroads that bought mechanical reefers. And the Santa Fe, normally an innovator, stoutly avoided them too. They didn't buy one single mechanical reefer until 1955. Ice, they said, is nice. But frozen food was an emerging market, and the Santa Fe wasn't one to ignore those. The trucking industry, finding ice to be a nuisance, embraced both mechanical reefers and this new shipper. And the Santa Fe? Well, "special handling" was a good excuse for their new Piggy-Back® Service. But all their first batches of trailers were mechanically refrigerated. All of them.
The light-colored pickup at the left of the photo is a 1951 Ford and the dark one behind it is a 1948-1950 (those three years all had the same body). I drove our '50 Ford pickup (and less often, our '59 Chevy) when I first got my license in 1969 and actually several years after that, and it was fun to drive in spite of no power steering or brakes and what seemed like a two-foot gearshift throw. One time, I pulled into a restaurant to eat and when I got in there, there was a truck driver sitting by the window and he saw me pull in. He told me that if I could drive that pickup, I could easily drive a semi. I have never driven a semi (a large box van, yes) so I don't know if what he said was true. It DID take some finesse to avoid clashing gears with the Ford, though. Doug
CGW had tried it back in the 1930's. Can't recall a specific year and have divested myself of many reference books now.
Even better if everything works as it should. When I had my CDL, one rig I drove had a four on four. It was so worn, if not careful you could bash knuckles on the dash, then almost throw your shoulder out, as it went so far back. Almost like reaching behind the seat. Yikes. Try timing your shifts doing that. It was a PITA. Modern semis are a dream, compared to forty some years ago.
