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.