For My Friend, Louise DePape

I recently received an e-mail from my friend, Louise DePape saying that she loves "the beautiful trains, especially the the two-tone orange and silver ones."

This post is dedicated to you, Louise. These are some of my favourite ones, too. They are from the Southern Pacific's Coast Daylight trains that ran between San Francisco and Los Angeles from 1937 to 1974. This route started by using steam locomotives and switched to diesels in the 1950s. The picture on the front of this post card is one of the diesels used on that route. It is an E-9 model of locomotive built by Electro-Motive Diesel for delivery in December of 1954 to the Southern Pacific Railroad. It made its first trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco on January 4, 1955. It was retired on December 24, 1969 and donated for heritage preservation. It is currently at the California Railway Museum in Sacramento. After this diesel was retired, Southern Pacific continued to operate the Coast Daylight until 1974, when AMTRAK took over the operation of passenger service in the United States.

The post card was published by the Railway & Locomotive Historial Society, Inc. They were founded in 1921, and are the oldest organization in North America devoted to railroad history. They were among the first anywhere to pursue formal studies in the history of technology. The Society promotes research and encourages preservation of documentation and photography of business history, finance, labor history, and biography as well as technology. I am familiar with them because I used to go to the Los Angels County Fairgrounds in Pomona, California as a kid to vist the Big Boy on static display. This is the same Big Boy (4014) that was reactivated by the Union Pacific for the sesquicentennial (150 years) of the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

Twins, Separated by 3 Years

The pictures on these two post cards are exactly the same; one isn't even a

copy of the other. Notice the moon in the upper left-hand corner. It has the same cloud shadowing on both cards. The round front of each train are identical; the headlight shines in the same manner. There is nothing extremely obvious that is different from one post card to the other at first glance. I can see two differences: 1) the border on the top one is smaller and darker than the second, and 2) the number and title at the bottom, while the same wording, are in different font size and style. Also, one is a bit lighter than the other - but that could just be age. The top card was mailed in 1911 and the bottom one in 1914. The reason that these two cards are the same is because they were both published by the same company.

On the top post card the publisher's name is very difficult to read because the author of the message went out of the borders. The printing going up the side of the post card reads: "PUBLISHED BY BARKALOW BROS. DENVER, COLO. MADE IN U.S.A." The second post card, however, shows the publisher very clearly. I guess that after 3 years in the publishing business, they made some money, figured they would be around longer and paid to have a logo developed for them. It is the circle in the upper left corner of the bottom card.

The Royal Gorge (also Grand Canyon of the Arkansas) is a canyon on the Arkansas River near Cañon City, Colorado. With a width of 50 feet (15 m) at its base and a few hundred feet at its top, and a depth of 1,250 feet (380 m) in places, the 10-mile-long canyon is a narrow, steep gorge through the granite of Fremont Peak. It is one of the deepest canyons in Colorado. On April 19, 1878, a hastily assembled construction crew from the Santa Fe began grading for a railroad just west of Cañon City in the mouth of the gorge. The D&RG whose end of track was only ¾ of a mile from Canon City raced crews to the same area, but were blocked by the Santa Fe graders in the narrow canyon. By a few hours they had lost the first round in what became a two-year struggle between the two railroads that would be known as the Royal Gorge War. The railroads went to court with each trying to establish their primacy to the right of way. After a long legal battle that ended in the U.S. Supreme Court, on April 21, 1879, the D&RG was granted the primary right to build through the gorge that in places was wide enough at best for only one railroad. On May 7, 1879 the first excursion train traveled through the Royal Gorge after years of court battles between the Denver & Rio Grande and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (AT&SF or Santa Fe) railroads.

Two Birds with One Stone...

This post card shows how the Southern Pacific Railroad solved two challenges with one design. The first, and most obvious is the fact that this engine is not running backwards. The front of the train is to the right, where the cab is. In the northern California routes, especially through the Sierra Nevada mountains, the engineers' lives were being threatened. As the locomotive entered the various tunnels, the smokestack led the way. As they continued through the tunnel there was no place for the smoke and gases to escape. The train crew had to drive right through the heavy pollution, breathe in the poisons and, perhaps succumb to lack of oxygen. The solution to this was to move the cab forward. The fireman, in a coal-fired locomotive, was just below the smokestack rather than behind it; thus, he, too, avoided asphyxiation. The first cab-forward locomotive was delivered in 1908.
The second challenge that is solved in the locomotive shown on this post card was the need for power. Some of the grades the Southern Pacific faced were as much as 2.5%. Getting through the steep grades required either many engines linked together - or this solution. This engine is called a "Mallet" (pronounced mal-ay); it was invented by a Swiss (think lots of mountains) engineer Anatole Mallet who lived from 1837 to 1919. A Mallet engine has one boiler that is connected to two sets of driving cylinders; this is also called an articulated engine. What makes this a Mallet engine is that the steam goes through one set of cylinders (rear) at high pressure, the exhaust from those cylinders is at a lower pressure, but strong enough to still be used in the second set of cylinders (front set) before it is sent out the exhaust.

Again, this is an Edward Mitchell post card as indicated by the back of the post card.

The Water Just Disappears!

I grew up in Arizona so I know how unforgiving the desert can be. The river to the right of this train as it passes through Palisade Canyon in the desert of north-central Nevada, USA certainly looks full and flowing. Never mind being part of the easy route for building the transcontinental railroad,

the beauty of this canyon in the desert should be enough to choose this route. The river that the train tracks follow is called the Humboldt River. It was named in 1845 by John Fremont. The river starts north of Wells, Nevada and flows westward to Lovelock, 530 kilometers (330 miles) away. It has the distinction of being the longest river that begins and ends within the boundaries of one state. But, it you add the winding, wandering, twisting and turning path through the state it could be twice as long.
Early explorers, settlers and empire builders took advantage of the Humboldt River, each in their own way. It was discovered by Peter Ogden (think Ogden Utah and the Ogden Route of the Southern Pacific) in 1828 while he was exploring for the Hudson's Bay Company; their trappers took beavers from the waters of the Humboldt. The settlers that followed the Overland Trail to California would have probably rejoiced at the cools waters in their trek through the desert. The builders of the Transcontinental Railroad used the path of the Humboldt River to get through northern Nevada on their way to Utah.
The Humboldt River, unlike so many other rivers, does NOT flow into the ocean. It slowly loses all its water to evaporation in what is called the Humboldt Sink. The United States Geological Survey suggests that Palisade Canyon is the point where the river's flow ceases to increase and begins to decrease. The back of the card that you see here, below:

is the typical back of the post card printed by Edward Mitchell of San Francisco. I have written about him in many past blogs, so I will save you the verbiage here. Suffice it to say that the company was a major printer and publisher of view-cards depicting scenes throughout the American West. They temporarily moved to Clay Street when their Post Street office was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, but they later went on to set up a factory on Army Street. Even though they developed a number of their own unique techniques to print their cards like the Mitchell Photo-Chrome Process, many cards were also contracted out to other printers. Likewise they printed postcards for a number of other publishers.