Nostalgia & History > few Santa Fe "extra" rosters . .

. . few more finds in the "extras" boxes;
top: my personal favorite older Santa Fe paint job, the old dress blues with silver trucks fresh out of the paint booth sitting at Barstow, CA 9-74. Not quite sure why this one was in a box?
middle: this is a one of a kind factory mistake that was still untouched as of 3-79. This was the only Santa Fe GP35 with blue above the number boards. The shot was taken at Santa Fe's Hobart yard in the Los Angeles area and was badly overexposed.
bottom: a string of stored ALCO DL600's were sitting in the Santa Fe San Bernardino, CA B yard 7-74.
JB



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/05/12 13:13 by 3rdswitch.

---

---

---

3rdswitch Wrote:

> . . few more finds in the "extras" boxes;
> top: my personal favorite older Santa Fe paint
> job, the old dress blues with silver trucks fresh
> out of the paint booth sitting at Barstow, CA
> 9-74.

I had heard rumors that there wasn't an absolute cutoff date when Santa Fe went from painting locomotives in the pinstripe scheme to painting in blue and yellow warbonnet, and this is further evidence. The first blue and yellow warbonnets came out in June 1972, and more than two years later, here's a fresh pinstriper. It's a shame we can't read the paint date stencil on the nose just to have it in writing.

The 3328 also does violence to another theory. The shapes of the "billboard" letters on the long hood of Santa Fe locomotives tended to come in two distinct variations best discerned by looking at the "e." Factory paint jobs from EMD tended to look like 3328 and 3345, where the "e" has an odd flat spot on the upper right side, the "tail" dips down quite a ways before curving up, and the "hole" is considerably elongated horizontally. My impression had been that, except in the very early 60's, Santa Fe repaints and GE factory jobs used a more refined set of letter shapes, where the "e" is rounder, the top edge of the "tail" barely dips down before curving up, and the "hole" is nearly a semicircle, as on 3428 below. If 3328 is a repaint, though, that throws that theory into a cocked hat (or at least, like the cutoff date, makes it somewhat less absolute).

Thanks for the photos! GP35's in pinstripes are a favorite of mine, too.

---

Well, for what it's worth (and that's not much) -- here's "Santa Fe" in Cooper Black, straight off my desktop.

I don't know if this digital font was drawn from the original Cooper Black linotype DNA, or if Santa Fe customized their version.

But even with variations everywhere, this looks more like one of our examples than another. For what it's worth!

~ BZ



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/05/12 17:25 by Notch16.

---