Railroaders' Nostalgia > Truth or Legend?

In response to my posting yesterday about 'Cruds' crakerjackhoghead told of seeing 8 SW1500's on an oil train headed toward Bakersfield in the 1980's.

This comment reminds me of an account that 10 SW-1500's were placed on the head end of a westbound loaded sugar beet train that made the
descent of the Beaumont grade sometime in the 1970's. As the story goes the engineer was Perry Beck, father of Robert Beck. 
Does anyone here on TO's have reliable knowledge of such a train? I personally don't recall any SW1500's being used on the beets, loaded or empty.
I do know that SW-1500's were used on Indio yard switchers; my first pay trip as an engineer was aboard one there. I also witnessed several occasions
where 4 or more SW1500's were lashed together for hauler assignments to and from City Of Industry destined Buena Park or Anaheim.

Jack Fuller, George ExSPCondr, do you care to comment?

Charlie

This was in the SF Bay Area but the most I ever saw were 3 coupled together as sole power on a train. But knowing how SP would throw consists together nothing would surprise me.

​As to your previous thread about SW1500's, they were indeed a really great unit. I wasn't as impressed with the MP15's when they came out but the original SW1500's were great.

Charlie;
The story is true about switchers on the beets. When it arrived in LA the switchers were removed and road power put on. The train graph was on the wall at the engineers locker room for a while. One time the Northridge local with Jimmy Cowan had to cut off and go on the point of the Starlight and bring it from Santa Susana to LAUPT with SW 1500's. They were great locomotives and seemed to always start and never fail on you.
Tom

switchlamp Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Charlie;
> The story is true about switchers on the beets.
> When it arrived in LA the switchers were removed
> and road power put on. The train graph was on the
> wall at the engineers locker room for a while. One
> time the Northridge local with Jimmy Cowan had to
> cut off and go on the point of the Starlight and
> bring it from Santa Susana to LAUPT with SW
> 1500's. They were great locomotives and seemed to
> always start and never fail on you.
> Tom

Fiction as far as running Beaumont as a group of 10. True that road power released and little switchers delivering the train to the factory, case being Holly in Santa Ana which used C415s in a group of 4 to deliver the train

There was one train, up the Coast that made it to Goleta and died back when we had 14 hours. I want to say the hoghead was, I think, Haberbosh, a San Joaquin man. They were out of power in LA so they called him for the GGM with 3 SW 1500s. He raised all kinds of hell but was ordered out of town. They all had those blocks locked in.

Well, with no toilets, they had to stop and walk back to the caboose a few times :) : ),  and they were way overloaded. They never got up any speed at all and couldn't stay ahead of themselves in the sags. They requested to eat at Santa Barb and were denied.. They had 20 minutes to work and the dispatcher ordered them to keep going until they died. That they did, at Goleta died at Goleta.

A west train went into the ditch at San Ardo on afternoon and took out the west switch and stacked them up pretty good..  Larry Manthie "Auto" was the hoghead. I was deadheaded from SLO to releave a crew from Wat. Jct that were sent down with a SW1500.and some ballast cars. the night before.  When we got there, they had the shoo-fly in and wanted to get that engine and the mty cars & caboose back to the Jct.  Well we left San Ardo with no restrictions and took off. The engine was headed west and we had a grain car behind the motor and you had a nice close view of the truck We were moving right along, 60 mph, ahead of  #13, and were getting getting close to Gonzales. The  brakeman, Mike Robinson,  was sitting in the firemans seatnodding off.  For a long time, the track by the depot was rough in that the engines would start to hunt.and you had to really hang on. It finally got so bad you had to tie a west train with air and pull them through in order to stay on the rail. (It was like that for years until they finally lined it back up)
 Well I would look around once and awhile and watch the truck on that first car and it was hunting  but not bad I knew what it would do when we reached that section of track. Well we hit the rough track and I told the brakeman to take a look at truck behind us. He turned around  and went white. He started yelling we should stop, we are going to derail, etc. I told him not to worry about it and by then I  had some air under under the train. He watched that  truck all the way to the Jct.. He didn't sleep the rest of the way as usual.


Nudge

Between 1975 and 1977 I lived in Alhambra just east of the Freemont Ave road crossing and 5 little house south of the SP on Primrose Lane. Late on Sunday afternoons SP would run an eastbound hauler pulled by a large amount of SW 1500s.It seemed to me that the SP would send these SW1500s to Taylor for servicing and then send them back on Sunday when they were done. I have no idea if that was what was going on but it happened on Sunday afternoons when I would be washing my car. I could hear them coming for quite a while and this was before the ditch project that lowered the SP track through Alhambra and there was a good grade for them to climb going east. When they would crawl by the crap and flames comming out of the stacks looked like blowtorches and was quite a show.

CCT still rosters 4 SW1500's 1501, 1502,1503,1504 all ex SP we picked from a large group stored in Roseville in 2004 for use at the port of Stockton, 1502 is down for a main generator and  Will move over to the Lodi line to Replace GP18 1790 in a month or two great units easy to maintain and will handle the yard chores without a problem

Charlie,
​I don't know about the SWs on the empty oil, but I do have personal experience taking 44 cars to El Segundo with four of them.  This was 40 empty tanks for Standard Oil, and 4 loads of lumber for the team track.
The grade is really steep on this old PE track, and we were down to under 3mph when we crested the hill.  Its just as steep down the other side, and took a 10 lb reduction as soon as the units crested the hill.

​Due to the SP's power woes, I sent 110 mostly empty cars to West Colton with six C-415s on a Saturday night in 1974 when we could spare them at C of I.  It was quite a smoky trip back from WC with our loads from Pomona to C of I with no dynamic.
G