Nostalgia & History > Coast Daylight at Third & Townsend

As commuters pile off their train and head for the salt mines the Coast Daylight is about to head south for LaLa Land. Im sure there were a few of those work bound folks wishing they were on that Daylight Observation Car.

Robert Morris Photography

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A Guild Navigator from Dune.

Posted from BlackBerry

That must be parlor observation 2954.  Rode a few miles in her back in the 60s.

Lee Hower - Sacramento

Great shot, Bob.

~Ryan

SP put a large set of lights on the top of this car.  Besides a red one, what are the other lights for?

SP lost a pair of tapered-end Observation cars in 1941 and 1942 to rear-end collisions. These cars were equipped only with streamlined marker lights mounted on the letterboards above the windows, just before the stylish taper begins. There was no other rearward illumination.

Over the course of a decade, SP's dedicated rear-end passenger cars -- tapered and blunt-end sleepers and lounges and the six Parlor Observations built for the Daylight -- began showing more lights. Across the fleet, some teardrop markers were moved rearward for better visibility, and soon large red oscillating Mars lights in streamlined round housings were added. Those lights in turn were eventually complemented by clusters of green and red markers flanking the main housing. SP Rule 19 covered their use, and it included running the oscillating light day or night, while using the red and green markers in varying combinations to denote main or siding track running, including against the current of traffic.  

Shown is the sister car to Bob's photo, SP 2297, which was converted to a high-capacity Chair Car. Both cars -- rebuilt in 1949 for the Shasta Daylight with faired-in large oscillating lights -- had those ungainly boxes grafted to their roofs in the mid-1950s, as SP standardized on the Pyle Gyralite for passenger and official car use; similar boxes were added to SP's fleet of heavyweight official cars. The four earlier Parlor Observation cars, nearly identical to the ones in the two photos, retained their original inset backup light housings, but with red oscillating mechanisms installed behind the glass cover, and with red and green markers in small boxes grafted to either side. (See Auburn_Ed's excellent photo below.)

The Parlor Observation in Bob's lead photo, SP 2954 as Lee Hower called it correctly, was cut up for scrap as the last operating SP Parlor car, and it survived almost to the bitter end of SP passenger operations. The sister car, shown at Fresno next to the Pullman Car shed in about 1969, is alive and well and running in Portland, Oregon. The car, still cozy with steam heat, is currently resplendent in Daylight colors, and now carries a prodigious round oscillating light in a streamlined housing in place of that distinctive but somewhat esthetically insulting five-light box cluster. You can ride the car during the Holiday Express trains operated by the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation, and SP 4449 is often called for the other end, to provide the steam. (The Fresno Pullman shed also survives, against all efforts by SP to level it in the 1960s.)

A good writeup with detail photos covering these rear light packages is on page 344 of the SPH&TS passenger car series, Volume Two. Some photos of the wrecks which contributed to these light encrustations also provide sobering background. The book series itself, with everything you'd ever want to know about the entire historic SP passenger car fleet, is worth its weight in gold... and costs far less!

~ BZ



Edited 13 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/15 12:26 by Notch16.

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Another view taken at San Jose.

Ed

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