Western Railroad Discussion > Kerosene lanterns

When did railroads stop using kerosene lanterns?

Thanks &
Happy Holidays,

Dave

I don't know, but I've got a new (new when I got it) Penn Central lantern. Many roads used them in towers and at stations long after electric lanterns replaced them in train service.

Based on pictures I have seen, by late fifties

Around the Bay Area, SP used them on switchstands until the early or mid sixties

1964/65 in Portland on both SP and SP&S at Hoyt St.

Butch,,,,,many moons ago

The Penn Central had lighted switch-targets as late as 1972 in Terre Haute, IN.

In 1966 the CB&Q still required all switch engines to display a red _and_ a white kero lantern on the back end of all switch engines at night. Thus, this was done even on the back of NW2s.

All switchstands at Dayton's Bluff (St Paul) were still kero. GN also still had kero lamps on switchstands in their major Minneapolis yard, Union, at that time.

The Milwaukee at South Minneapolis and at Pigs Eye were also still using kero switchstands.

As a matter of fact, I own a kero switch lamp (green/yellow) stamped with BN ownership. Probably from Northtown.

A few switchmen in the Twin Cities still used a kero lamp, occasionally, at night - mostly just to be weird.

Kerosene markers are still in use - on the rear of my private car TIOGA PASS..
Markers are still required, accotding to my rulebook....

TIOGA PASS

On the SP, markers were done by the 60s. I remember switch stand lights at 7th St in 69 & 70.

I know all the switch stand lights and a lot of markers were put in an old tool house in Wat. Jct. in the early 60s. For some reason, a local officer at the time, ordered the building leveled because people were trying to "Steal" the lights.

Go figure!


Nudge

How do they perform at 90 MPH? I am sure just fine, but still I am impressed.

Oh yeah, markers.

In 1966, road cabooses and all locomotives were using electric markers and classification signals around the Twin Cities.

Kero was still being used on wooden cabooses on transfers on Q, GN, MILW, NP. I believe at that time CNW and CGW, at least, had pretty much discontinued cabooses on transfers. Can't remember seeing what M&StL, and Rock Island were doing at that time.

Q transfer cabooses were still using a single kero lamp to illuminate the conductors' desk.

In the early 70's AT&SF was still using Adlake-Kero hand lanterns with cobalt blue fresnel globes at Topeka, on the West Rip. The foreman would hang one of them and a flag on the last car or at the switch before he went home for the night. The tool room at the shops had a good supply of 3 1/4" red and blue globes, both round & fresnel.

Way off topic, but does anyone else remember those round, black highway lanterns that burned with a blue flame to mark construction many years ago? What did they burn that gave off such a blue flame?

--Mark J

I don't remember a blue flame but I remember the round little lamps. No glass globe or anything, just a spherical oil tank and some little wind shield around a wick at the top. My brother and I called them fireballs.

In the early to mid-60's the S.P. car department used blue globe kerosene lanterns in Eugene.

The Rock Island had kerosene lamps on the swiches in St Louis in 1971. Then when the man that kept them fueled retired that fall, they all were taken in a couple of days.

Smudge pots. I remember them in San Francisco is the sixties for street repair. They did away with them because some kid brought one into a house and drop it and the kerosene spilled on the floor and it all ignited.

Around 1966, I saw Santa Fe mail train No. 7 come into Bakersfield during the Christmas-season mail rush with an express boxcar as the last car on the train instead of the usual coach. On the back end of the boxcar were two marker lamps which had to be kerosene-burning since these cars had no electrical outlets for marker lamps like Santa Fe cabooses had.

I remember cleaning chinmeys and globes, trimming wicks and refilling the tanks on caboose markers as well as the spare lantern on cabooses for Condr. Logan on Milwaukee Road cabooses in the early 1970s. The switches on the yard lead at Deer Lodge also had kerosene targets until 1972 or 1973 or so.

The CNW use to use Carbide lanterns. They large and put out quite a bright light. Car inspectors used them in the yards. Filled a resivor with a cup of carbide, then added water which created a gas, which made the flame.