Southern Pacific Cab Forwards - Saugus Train Station, CA
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2019
- Home movies shot by my grandparents. This is around the Saugus Station in Newhall, CA. Not sure where the first loco was filmed. I'm guessing around that area. The train coming out of the tunnel is at the intersection of Soledad and Bouquet Cyn Rds. The tunnel was opened up in '43, so I'm guessing this film is pre-war.
There's AC-5 4112, AC-4 4100 and AC-5 4113. My grandfather is the one climbing up the Pacific Fruit Express car for dramatic effect!
UP boxcar coupling up at 1:40 has archbar trucks. These were banned from interchange service in 1938 I think. So this film is prior to that.
great footage! just as cool seeing the old rollingstock and equiptment
That's a really cool film. Especially with the cab forward helper at the end of the consist as well. Thank you for sharing
This was cool
Really enjoyed the video.
Days of yesteryear. Love to see the caboose.
A time when most folks respected other's property - didn't have all of the vandals defacing equipment.
The film looks to me like it is from the late Thirties. 16 mm color film was available but the film and the processing would have been expensive.
In 1953 my family moved to North Hollywood not far from where the Saugus Line and the Coast Line via the Chatsworth cutoff diverged near the Lockheed B-1 Plant in Burbank. Saw many Cab Forwards on both lines. Never saw an AC-4 and not many AC-5. All had the silver "apron" on the front of the cab. The most memorable sighting was seeing a long unit train being pulled by a later class CF in early 1954 or '55 consisting of all Pacific Fruit Express cars. Walking home from school with two other kids, we all counted the cars and got three different counts. I counted 99, another was in the low nineties, and one in the mid-nineties. Confessed, I wanted it to be an even 100. There was an onshore breeze so the train appeared to be silently gliding past the Lockheed Air Terminal and what was then still an open area to the west. No smoke, only whisps of condensed steam from the locomotive. Also saw the 4449 heading the Coast Daylight on its very last scheduled southbound run. I believe it was the Friday afternoon in the first week of January 1955.
p.s. Forgot to mention that the last car in the reefer train was, of course, a classic SP tuscan red bay window caboose.
What a memory to have.
That must have been an incredible time to live. Thank you for sharing your memory with us
I love the SP Cab Forwards! I love the AC_6s to AC-12s the best! The freight trains here are awesome! Love the looks of the cars.
Fantastic! Thanks for posting
Flat face cab forwards were pre-war. Also after 1947 the bottom of the front was painted with silver paint so motorists at road crossings could see them better.
The southern Pacific cab forwards were great steam locomotives for the Sierra Nevada Mountain & Cascade Mountain crossings. I’m an N scale model railroader and my model railroad is the Pacific West Coast Railroad. I’m having it focus on the time period from 1974 to the present. I will be adding more Southern Pacific & Santa Fe as well as Union Pacific, Western Pacific, Burlington Northern freight locomotives & cabooses as well as freight cars for freight operations and also more Amtrak cars as well.
8 mm home movies shot with a spring-wound camera. Also unique historical records.
Thanks for sharing this neat film!
Really remarkable footage of Cab Forward operations. Thanks for putting this up!
So cool... Wow! Almost feel like you're there, so natural and realistic. Those look like Block 1 Cab Forwards built in the 1920s?
Those AC5’s and 4’s look better in Pre-1946 than the Post-1946
Awesome, thanks for sharing.
Fantastic stuff! An area I hope to someday model in N scale. Thanks so much for sharing!
Also: No hardhats, no safety vests: not saying things were better then, just ....dfferent
They had a more focus due to lack of tech so it was a different understanding going around
I searched around on Google Earth, and I think this former tunnel was between Saugus and Santa Clarita Metrolink, after the Antelope Valley line has turned northeast and started following the Santa Clarita River. From Soledad Canyon Road, the hill where the SP would have tunneled is readily visible.
It's been ID'd as being the tunnel that was behind the current AutoZone at 23046 Soledad Canyon Rd, Santa Clarita, CA
@@desertrick - Then is that a tunnel for Bouquet Canyon Road visible on the left side at 0:27? The power lines in that background could be the existing one that goes through that area today. I could not find any reference to any tunnel on Bouquet or Soledad Canyon Road besides the existing one in the Narrows area. If so, then a profound amount of earthmoving has happened since SP daylighted this tunnel -- everything from the railroad to the Santa Clarita River.
Is it not possible that tunnel is the San Fernando Tunnel, whose south portal is buried under I-5 and CA-14 now? The mountain that train is coming out from under is too large to be the little side-hill that was daylighted by Santa Clarita. It could be the north portal of the San Fernando Tunnel, which leads into a sweeping curve to the northwest.
Those CF’s were goofy looking machines.
I always wondered how a cab forward could feed the firebox when the tender was at the other end of the locomotive?
They burn oil.
honestly, they shouldve put the cab forward so that they'd have the visability of a diesel. and if they started making oil burners instead of coal burners, all you'd have to do is fill the tender with water and oil, and the thing would operate like a diesel while at the same time having the tractive effort and strength of a steamer.
The SP cab forwards were oil burners.
@@TenMinuteTrips i wonder why other companies didnt follow suite.
They were oil burners by design, no way to easily get coal from the tender to the firebox on a cab forward. They put the cabs in the front for one specific reason - to not choke out the crew with smoke. SP had a lot of tunnels on their lines so they designed their own steam engines to mitigate the smoke problem.
@@wesgtx440 I thought it was designed for visibility due to the boilers getting longer?
They were designed as a cab forward so the engineer would be ahead of the smoke stacks through tunnels. Great footage, thank for sharing it with us.
when giants roamed the earth...thanks
40 footers were king
First train had a Santa Fe engine and caboose, so it wouldn't (normally) be close to Saugus...
jkfan2005 Thanks for the info. Not sure where that was shot, but the cab forwards have been ID’d as being in Saugus.
Some Santa Fe thru- freights were routed thru the Newhall - Antelope Valley line to Bakersfield on occasion due to traffic issues at Cajon pass. The use of Prewar for the US would be before Dec of 1941 and by the looks of the automobiles and equipment and markings on the passing trains plus it's shot in color, I would date this film around 1946-48. Filming of trains during the war 41-45' was strictly prohibited and there were visor shrouds over the headlights for west coast blacked out night time operation. The word "Lines" was dropped from the Southern Pacific starting in 1947 on all re-paints and shoppings of Locomotives and rolling stock, but this process took a few years to complete. The earthquake of July 1952 closed this same Newhall-AV line and many trains including Santa Fe 's were re-routed north-south along the coast thru Ventura. Also earlier for 2 weeks during Jan 1952, Southern Pacific and Western Pacific trains were routed on the Santa Fe lines thru Barstow, Mojave and Tehachapi due to the severe winter at Donner Pass where the SP's 49er was snowbound.
I'd normally agree with you that being shot in color makes the 1946-48 period more likely, but Desert Rick also posted some similar (and similarly excellent) footage by his grandfather of the L.A. Union Station opening in May 1939, so it seems at least as likely that this is from around then. The one automobile that we see clearly around 1:45 is also from the late 1930s, so it's not conclusive either.
Too bad there's not a little better resolution/focus in the original footage, or we could get a pretty solid answer from the reweighing numbers on the cars. At 1:50 we're looking right at the relevant numbers, and the right-hand end of the bottom line of data under the 100330 is going to be a two-letter code for where the car was last weighted, and then the month and year -- and that would have usually been within the last year or so. It's as much imagination as data trying to read it, but all else being equal, I could more easily imagine that year number starting with '3' rather than '4'.
Regardless of which time period this is from, this is remarkably early color footage, and really interesting to see. Thank you for posting it, Rick!
Wait, Rick, when you said "the tunnel was opened up in '43" you mean it was turned from a tunnel into a cut, right? So the fact that it's still a tunnel would be pretty conclusive in saying this is before '43, and since it wouldn't have been taken during the war, that would make it pretty conclusively pre-war.
How did the engineers like them?
They were well loved in mountainous territories for obvious reasons, but a common fear were collisions with trucks.
I've always wondered why steam loco's had the cab behind the boiler, seems illogical and a bad idea from so many perspectives, I didn't know there actually were cab forward types!
Beyond visibility and better breathing in tunnels, the cab forward doesn't offer too many more advantages than a regular steam locomotive.
2-4-4-2?
2 leading trucks (small wheels) 4 drivers (large wheels) 4 drivers 2 trailing trucks. 2-4-4-2