Nostalgia & History > AT&SF #8, may not be what you think ...

Here's one I hadn't seen before, Bruce Black shot this @ Fountain, CO on Jan. 5, 1976.

Did the Santa Fe have more than one? What happened to this one? The 'cab' lettering says "Rail Test Car No. 8".

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Must be the 'mail door' in back, eh Vince???

;^)

It looks to have a severe "underbite." It needs braces...

santafe199 Wrote:
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> Must be the 'mail door' in back, eh Vince???
>
> ;^)


looks like that back one is the 'female' door, there's already 'male' in the front door ...

valmont Wrote:

> Did the Santa Fe have more than one?

As a matter of fact, yes. They had two built to this design, cars 7 and 8, whose actual road numbers were 9170 and 9171 (you can see "9171" above the windshield in Black's photo). According to the first edition of Shine & Ellington's Passenger Train Equipment 1870-1975 of the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Vol.2: Business and Special Purpose Cars, both were built in 1961 by Erlinder Manufacturing and powered by Ford V-8 engines. They were based on an AAR prototype numbered 301, and detected rail defects by the residual magnetic method. The 7 was eventually fitted with ultrasonic detectors. At the time the book was published in 1975, both 7 and 8 were still in service, though they have probably long since hit the junk heap. Santa Fe had rostered a total of seven rubber-tired rail detector "cars" of various designs by the mid-70's. By the mid-80's, in-house rail detection technology had evolved to Chevy Suburbans outfitted with a pair of ultrasonic detector "shoes" that slid along the rail on a film of soapy water ahead of the front hirail wheels. Eventually, Santa Fe started contracting with Sperry for rail detection.

Looks like Soo Line had at least one, too:

http://www.northeast.railfan.net/images/soo1100.jpg