Nostalgia & History > ATSF "Fuel Foiler" "10-Pack" Spine Cars

In 1980 on my first visit to the ATSF in Arizona, I saw spine cars for the first time. These were the "Fuel Foiler" or "10-Pack" cars. Here is the first one I saw at speed eastbound at Antares, AZ with a caboose. Seemed very high-tech then, and looks very old fashioned with the caboose now.

Great shot!

And a red caboose with a black roof, in the desert...must have been a "cool" ride!

Those were built in the Topeka Shops in the late 70's.

Nice John. I remember building the outbound 891 train in LA back then when it would be a solid set. You could barely sqeeze eleven of them into straddle buggy track one which was at the time the longest track at Hobart yard. It looked good out on the road but they had braking problems as if I remember correctly only the middle nine sets of trucks had brakes? They didn't brake well. Like Santa Fe's strange unique double stack car they didn't last long.
JB

3rdswitch Wrote:
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> Nice John. I remember building the outbound 891
> train in LA back then when it would be a solid
> set. You could barely sqeeze eleven of them into
> straddle buggy track one which was at the time the
> longest track at Hobart yard. It looked good out
> on the road but they had braking problems as if I
> remember correctly only the middle nine sets of
> trucks had brakes? They didn't brake well. Like
> Santa Fe's strange unique double stack car they
> didn't last long.
> JB
They didn't brake well to say the least. It took all the air you had, (full service) and that still wasn't enough. An old head Emporia engineer (now deceased) passsed that info on to a Wellington-west engineer after his first trip with a trainset. With fair warning, that guy ran a red one before he got to Waynoka. They didn't have any brakes on the end trucks, that might have been part of the problem.

That caboose looks darn nice to me. God, I miss those things!

3rdswitch Wrote:

> Like Santa Fe's strange unique double stack car they
> didn't last long.

The 10-packs were built in the late 70's and the last ones were retired in the mid-90's.