Nostalgia & History > Pilot plows on SP Fs

I took this picture of a westbound Southern Pacific freight on March 3, 1962 at West Reno, NV. The lead unit lacks the usual pilot plow. It was rare to see plow-less units in the Sierra-Reno area. I've always wondered if the SP tried to confine such units to the Coast and Sunset routes. When the plowless units were new they had a a pair of silver stripes across the bottom of the pilot.

John Bromley
Omaha

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Did the SP manufacture and install the plows at the Sacramento shops?

John Bromley

Here's one being put on at Roseville in 1961.

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Bob, really cool shot of the installation of the plow with the from/to addresses! But check out the handwriting style! Anyone write like that now?

Also note the patch on the nose of the 6222. Looks like it just got MU on those nose by the headlight.

Lee Hower - Sacramento

In good company - KM's on the next track over.

Talk about a neat way to answer a question! Thanks Bob.

John

Builder photos of the later orders of ALCo PA units show them sans plows; they were
added by SP upon arrival.

The nose MU as seen here was an EMD kit the railroads could purchase. This consisted of a MU receptacle and enclosure for it all covered by a properly curved door. Made a neat installation.
RWJ

mcfflyer Wrote:
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> Bob, really cool shot of the installation of the
> plow with the from/to addresses! But check out
> the handwriting style! Anyone write like that
> now?
>
> Also note the patch on the nose of the 6222.
> Looks like it just got MU on those nose by the
> headlight.
>
> Lee Hower - Sacramento

And how nice the blending bodywork turned out apparently depended on how much shop time was available for a Bondo™ pass!

~ BZ

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That is more than likely the heaviest intra-company memo I have ever seen.

Jay

mcfflyer Wrote:
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> Bob, really cool shot of the installation of the
> plow with the from/to addresses! But check out
> the handwriting style! Anyone write like that
> now?
>
> I'd guess that whoever wrote that was taught cursive by the nuns!! as to writing like that now, I just read an article that many school districts no longer teach cursive at all. It's all thumbs on the electronic gizmos now, I guess. :-(
C.

Carol Voss
Bakersfield, CA

> Anyone write like that
> now?

Yeah, Lee, I can still write like that, but almost the only time I do is when I'm copying train orders at the model railroad museum. A visitor once took a handful of our orders to the late Chard Walker, retired Santa Fe operator extraordinaire, and he sent me a long letter explaining all the errors in format, including the fact that when orders are handwritten instead of being typed, they should be in "telegrapher's script," which is basically what was taught as "cursive" or "longhand." I have found that nearly everyone else at the model railroad operating sessions prints the orders they copy, usually all in capitals, including SCH and SMM, and they say they couldn't possibly write fast and clearly enough in longhand to do it that way.

D F W

I like the attention to the F unit, but would really like to see more detail on the KM's on the next track over. Great picture of RR people in action.

Wildebeest Wrote:
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> and they say they couldn't possibly write fast and
> clearly enough in longhand to do it that way.

In a sense this is amusing. When I was taught cursive writing back in the 3rd grade or so, I recall the teacher said that people had developed cursive writing as a way to speed up the writing of words. It took less time if you didn't have to lift the pen between each letter, hence the connected letters. Likewise if you could make the whole letter without lifting the pen as a series of connected strokes it was faster than making the letters from individual strokes.

Given that pens tended to splatter and bleed more when you were lifting or dropping the pen than when it was simply gliding over realtively smooth paper, I'm sure that cursive was faster than printing block letters in ink. Of course, like most all kids, I leanred to write in pencil rather than ink. But in those days I could write considerably faster than I could print in block caps. It generally wasn't all that hard to keep up with a person talking at a normal rate if you used some abbreviations and skipped an occasional word. Try that while printing blcok caps!

Of course these days my hand writing is both illegable and far slower than printing in block caps, and I can "type" using 3 or 4 fingers faster than I can do either. But that is the result of 45 years of programming computers, which isn't done in longhand.