I am going to incorporate Southern Pacific steam & diesel in my new DV&W RR layout and am wondering if SP’s Daylights or Sunsets were ever used to haul freight.
I already have the UP & ATSF running passenger consists on my layout, but I like the flashy SP colors on their locos and am wondering if they were dual service.
Daylight painted GS-4 4-8-4’s were used quite frequently on SP’s “Overnight” freight between San Francisco and Los Angeles. To the best of my knowledge, no Daylight painted diesels were ever used in freight service.
Andre
They certainly were on the Cotton Belt, and thence on the SP after about 1960 when SSW sent the units west to the Pacific lines. SSW had 2 PA’s (#300 & 301–>SP6067 & 6068), SP’s only Daylight F unit (a single FP-7 #330–>306–>SP6462) and the SP system’s only GP7 (#320–>304), all painted their version of Daylight (silver roof, yellow handrails). The cab units all wound up in freight service on SSW in Daylight, and then to SP. The GP-7 got repainted in 1957 to a rather bizarre (to purists) SSW variant of the “Black Widow” scheme unlike any other “Black Widow” geep on the roster, that was sort of like the paint job used on the RS3’s. The FP7 apparently went straight to red/gray in about 1959. Steve Goen’s SSW book on page 43 has two photos of #300 pulling into Memphis on the point of a freight in 1959.
Hope this is useful.
Many RRs would run a typically psgr eng on relatively short frt trains to break them in after shopping. The Daylight 4-8-4s were stnd power on the Overnights but they were trains made up of specially painted boxcars, black 40 ft steel with special lettering. Champ had decals for them at one time but I don’t know if they’re still available. But hey, it’s you,re RR do whatever turns you on.