Steam & Excursion > As The Behemoths Pass By Only The Bovines Are There To Notice!

If it were not for railfans back in the day scenes like this would be lost forever without a trace.  Fortunately for us, there were more than cattle present in Franklin Canyon in 1946 to record the passing of these 2 Santa Fe giants, #3725 and #3450.

I only wish the photographer had recorded his name on the negative sleeve so we could properly thank him.

Martin



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/15 03:13 by LoggerHogger.

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Hard to believe, but there are still cattle next to the tracks in Franklin Canyon, one of the last undeveloped places in the Bay Area. Thanks for the look back!!

That particular spot has a bit of development now:  https://goo.gl/maps/OomvS

The train is eastbound between the sidings of Luzon (now Collier) and Christie, east of Pinole, CA.  This particular location is now known as Asbury due to the Asbury Graphite plant at the end of the road straight ahead and to the right in the Google streetview image.

When the diesels arrived and took over for steam, there was no need for helpersout of Richmond or Malby, although SF did have some S-2's for a short period out of Malby to help the west bounds.....At Christie, there use to be a second siding and at the east end of the siding there was a train order office and the road where Christie siding now ends use to go between the siding and the main and was a gravel road...EB helpers use to cut off at Glen Fraiser and the WB helpers would go to chrisite and then work back to Glen Fraiser...there was a  water tank at the east end of Glen Fraiser siding and a water tank about 30 yrds behind the depot on the east side....Helpers would  tie down and wait for new orders to go back to Richmond or back to Malby......In the early a.m. as the sun was coming up, at one time it was possible to see as many as six 4-6-2's in the 1200/1300 numbers mixed with a hudson or some times a mike...The princeable power was 3700 4-8-2's and 4000 series mikes for freight service......The last steam powered freight I saw was 3459 at Port Chicago in 1952 on a EB and the 4-6-4's were living on borrowed time...I did not have a decent camera at the time or I would be running shots of all that i saw..