Nostalgia & History > SP GS-2 In Wartime

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/15 06:33 by drumwrencher.

drumwrencher Wrote:
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> RC Brown captioned these two pics "4411 taking
> water, June 1942, Eugene, Oregon". There was a
> long war ahead of her, and we weren't exactly on
> top of it yet. Anyone know if and when she got her
> Daylight colors back?

I've never seen a photo of a GS2 or 3 after the war in Daylight colors
Chris

The extended visor on the headlight was a necessary wartime precaution to reduce the visibility of the train from above, but I'm curious about how it limited the effectiveness of the headlight-- has anyone heard anything about that? Would sealed-beam headlights negated the need for the visor?

davew833 Wrote:
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> Would sealed-beam headlights negated the
> need for the visor?

No, I don't think so. They may well have helped, but they still spill enough light off-axis that it would be possible to spot from the air. (Keep in mind that nice moving fan of light on the ground to guide you to the front of the engine a hundred or so yards away!)

Now, all that said, blackout conditions early in the war were probably of pretty questionable need. Nobody had a decent radar until around 1943, and almost nobody could fly at night. Carrier planes with pilots unfamiliar with the area would have been able to bomb a good sized city like LA or SF at night if it wasn't blacked out, but what they hit would be pretty random. And their chances of making it back to the carriers and landing (especially if there was fog) would have been about nil. A train was moderately hard to hit at night, again, especially if it is mountainous and you don't know the land well. It may have made sense to black out cities, but probably not for trains.

But that is from a tactical point of view. Strategically it was very good to get things blacked out as best possible because a) it brought the war home to the populace, and b) there was some slight chance it might have helped.

As I recall, none of the GS-2 or 3 locos were ever restored to Daylight colors after the war. Some of the GS-4s were repainted Daylight post-war and some did not lose their Daylight livery even during the war.

John

Was there a train 2 or 12 at Eugene in 1942?

Look at the big tenders those engines came with. You'd think the Santa Fe would ordered the same when they got their first batch of big Baldwin Northerns.

If by "big" you mean the 3765 class-- didn't
their tenders have as much capacity as the SP?

Those are some serious headlight visors, and as someone else said, I wonder how they cut down the illuminated area ahead?
Tenders for Santa Fe 2900s are "big," with eight wheel trucks.

Brings up another question.
Had heard from some old "heads", the GS class engines that were assigned to run through to Portland were generally black on account of all the tunnels between Cascade Summit and Lookout in Oregon and the Daylight colors would have been hard to keep presentable.
Would that be correct?

Steve Panzik
Chiloquin, Or

In a matter of days the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sank two British battleships in south China sea, and launched the invasion of the Philippines, then a US possession. They then began preparations for what might have been an invasion of Hawaii, Alaska's Aleutian islands, Midway island, or the US west coast.

It probably isn't an over statement to say the White House in December of 1941 was in as much disarray as the White House in September of 2001. Any rumor could be true, any attack might become a reality.

(John Belushi's movie 1941 satirized the 1941 period in the Los Angeles area)

If you read Chester W. Nimitz' war diary (now available online, but a LONG read) you will find that reports of Japanese submarine sightings along the west coast were very common in the first year of the war, though generally unconfirmed. (It is worth remembering that "unconfirmed" could have meant that the submarine submerged and really was there, instead of always carrying the modern meaning of "someone was lying when they said it was there".) Some of them probably were there, and some probably were not there.

There were also the Japanese paper balloon attacks on the west coast. No, I'm not kidding, really! They made hydrogen balloons of lacquered paper, with a reserve gas canister and a release valve tied to a barometer to be able to get them up into the trade winds at around 20K feet (if I recall) that ran from Japan, over Alaska, and then down the west coast of the American continent. They had a timer on them that was set to 5-7 days (if I recall) which would cause the balloon to descend. A second barometer was set for a few thousand feet, and when it triggered it would light a fuse on an explosive charge that would disperse the remainder of the contents of the balloon. This amounted to a couple dozen hand grenades or incendiary charges. These were intended as terror weapons, since if one had landed in a major city it would have made quite a lot of carnage, and people would have demanded the Government Do Something.

Fortunately the government found out about these before the populace did, was fairly good at spotting them and sweeping them, and all sightings were made secret, both to avoid information to the Japanese on how well they worked, and to avoid frightening the general populace.

Of course also there were actually a few real sub attacks on the west coast, as others have mentioned.

Jap subs shelled Ventura, CA, and we had blackout curtains on out windows in Madera during the first part of the war. Folks took that war seriously...

Bill Deaver
Tehachapi, CA

Train No. 12 was the Cascade

Jeff

Not in 1942.