Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: sacramento

These diesels, to the uninitiated, were idolized in movies, on TV, and in countless model trainsets, and still are today. It might be the most-modelled diesel of all time. The only railroad that used the "Warbonnet" paint scheme was the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe (ATSF) Railroad (now Burlington Northern Santa Fe, or BNSF), introducing the scheme on their E1A passenger diesels in 1937. The F-Unit series of freight diesels, like the E1As, were built by EMD from 1939-1960, and the Santa Fe were the first buyers in 1941, continuing to be regular customers for them until the mid-1950s. #347C is the ultimate classic variant of F-Unit, the F7A Phase I, and in this case is equipped for passenger service with 102 m.p.h. gearing and a steam generator (or at least it would have had these things originally). I don't remember the date #347C was built, but it certainly would have been around 1949, as that was when the F7A was introduced, and that's when the Phase Is were, of course, being built.

You may remember this photo from my personal website, where I have had, at various times, a black and white scan of this. I recently did a color rescan, but the original print had been badly done, and naturally it was 13 years old when I scanned it. Therefore, I ran the photo through Adobe Photoshop LE to remove the excessive green cast, brighten it, and vastly increase the contrast, and now it looks alright, I think. It's more or less, finally, what I wanted it to be when I originally shot it.

This shot looks difficult to get, but in actuality all I had to do to get it legally was point the lens through the chainlink fence. This is certainly a period shot at this point, though, as most railroads, especially Union Pacific, the current owners of this works, use diesels with safety cabs now. When I took this, though, this was a Southern Pacific facility, and if you look carefully to the left, you can see an EMD SD45 painted in the Kodachrome color scheme that was planned for the aborted Souther Pacific/Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe merger. These locomotives were a common sight in the 1980s and early 1990s, but now they're of course very, very rare, if there are any left at all. There are obviously some other locos in the photo too, but its the SD45 that really stands out to me.