Nostalgia & History > SP caboose high above the Sacramento River

An eastbound climbing out of the Sacramento Canyon in the early 1990's. This location is about seven rail miles north of Dunsmuir.

Robert Morris Photography
http://www.snowcrest.net/photobob/index1.html

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Beautiful country.

Yard crews usually tried to put a "low car" ahead of a coupola caboose, to help with visibility seeing over a train. Was there a reason to do this with an SP bay window caboose, as well? Or, was this just happenstance?

-John

The snakes on the Rock Island would put a car of hogs ahead of the cab if they had them we had fun on the Rock.

> Yard crews usually tried to put a "low car" ahead
> of a coupola caboose, to help with visibility
> seeing over a train. Was there a reason to do
> this with an SP bay window caboose, as well? Or,
> was this just happenstance?

John, this may have been the case on kinder, gentler railroads, but this was SP. Nobody cared, one way or another.

When I moved from San Jose to Dunsmuir in late 1984, I loaded all of my family's belongings into a boxcar destined for unloading on the McCloud River railroad in Mt. Shasta. I literally covered the boxcar with "Do Not Hump" placards, to prevent it from crashing into a stationary battering ram on the far side of the Roseville hump (retarders were notorious scofflaws of the "no more than four" mph coupling rule). You guessed it, my belongings went over the hump, and compactly heaped against one end of the car, this despite the warning placards and waybills clearly stating that the car's contents belonged to an employee and were not to be humped. It actually worked out well, because the furniture that I hated, but my wife loved, was turned into fire wood.

-E.O.

(scan of one of an actual placard, below)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/14 20:41 by hogheaded.

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You should have sent out a 100 messages to everyone at RV with "Do not fail" at the end of the message

I thought SP was supposed to be "The Friendly".

-John

LarryDoyle Wrote:
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> I thought SP was supposed to be "The Friendly".

Boy, was that a long-running gag!

-E.O.