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Nostalgia & History > Wayback Wednesday: SP San Luis Obispo

1) I was looking for a photo to illustrate a Southern Pacific SDP-45 and found this in a program I'd made up for a Pacific Railroad Society meeting.  We're in San Luis Obispo CA probably in 1972 or 73.  A pair of these 3600 hp units have brought the Coast Starlight down from the Cuesta Grade and the train is loading passengers and changing crews.  Things that aren't there anymore: SP 3200-class locomotives were used on the Commutes after the FM TrainMasters were retired; not sure what happened to them after that, but none have survived.  In the background are the famous SP "beet rack" cars, carefully watched by a special subset of railfans (no, I don't think they were called "beetniks").  A few of these plain-bearing gondolas have been preserved, but most were scrapped.  One thing that was there last time I looked is the SLO water tank. 

2)  Here's the westbound (northbound) Starlight, with a proper locomotive on the point, but but the FP-7 is getting lots of help from the newer units behind it.

3)  South of the passenger area is the site of the San Luis Obispo roundhouse, which I was going to take photos of in 1959, but used all my film on retired SP 4-8-4 4460, which was on its way to St. Louis MO.  By the next time I was in the area, the roundhouse had been leveled, and only the turntable remained.  Here's some typical SP freight power for the early 1970s, with more beet cars in the background.

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Here's a preserved beet gondola at Orange Empire.  It's stored in Barn 7 and is not normally on public display, but it's protected from the elements.  I remember similar drop-bottom gons on the PE gravel trains going through Monrovia back in my much younger days, but they didn't have the beet-rack side extensions.

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