Nostalgia & History > Saluting roster shots (#3): B-units need love, too!

I wonder how many passenger miles this old veteran has put away!? How many thousands of people it has helped hustle up & down the high iron!? How much baggage & mail & express it has tugged on!? How many other Red & Silver thoroughbreds it has locked couplers with!? And now its reward is to be relegated to grinding away at slow, heavy tonnage on some branch line about as far away as it can get from the glorious miles it once ran.

All the while STILL wearing a true warbonnet on its flanks that its glory-hogging, A-unit siblings never carried! Do B-units have feelings?

1. AT&SF 339B is sitting spliced in between 2 more former passenger units at Superior, NE. It’s June 7, 1972  so summer is on hand, and the wheat rush is building. Along with its siblings this B unit will soon put its shoulders up against a few thousand tons of Midwestern agriculture, and help it start that slow trek down to the gulf.
Original Kodachrome slide by Richard C Kistler, acquired by AT&SF engineer John LaGesse and recently sold to yours truly.

Thanks for looking back!
Lance Garrels (santafe199)
John LaGesse (atsfer)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/23 04:12 by santafe199.

---

Thanks for reminding us about the B-units. So often they spent their lives working hard and not being appreciated by railfans.
Bob

refarkas Wrote: > ...  about the B-units ... not being appreciated by railfans ...

Yeah, it seems like nobody ever really stands up for a B-unit. On the other hand, it's not too hard to stand up for a Red & Silver B-unit. There was one time when I saw a Red & Sliver B-unit up close & personal. It was in 1979 at the roundhouse in Emporia. A filthy-dirty R/S B-unit (358B??) came into to the roundhouse in the consist of an inbound local. It was SO grimy I had to take a wad of paper towels and clean off the Warbonnet just so I could shoot a slide of it! Hey... it was the only time I was ever that close to Santa Fe Red & Silver. Only one other time I saw another R/S F7B on a train in Oklahoma City. But that was more than a block away, so I don't get to count that one... ;^)

Lance/199

refarkas Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for reminding us about the B-units. So
> often they spent their lives working hard and not
> being appreciated by railfans.
> Bob

I wonder if that is really so.....back in the days of diesel passenger streamliners....pre-Amtrak......B units were "necessary" to provide a smooth uninterrupted look of the power consist.  
This point has been proven many times over when one looks at later power consists made up of A units only facing forwards/backwards in willy-nilly fashion.

AA

Stanford White
Carmel Valley, CA

AND unappreciated by Lionel aficionados BITD.
Who wants a B unit? Or a baggage car?
Few folks bought them.
Kinda like the pink 'girl's' Sting-Ray bicycles.
Hence, today they are valuable rarities!
...Lorenzo

Did not the Santa Fe 'B' units carry the steam generator as the 'A' units did not have them?

James R.(Jim) Baker
Whittier, CA

Correct.