What modern diesel locomotives did SP use in road and local switcher service from 1960-1980?
They used A lot of gp-9’s and SW-1500’s for yard and local switching
And passenger sevice from the 1960’ to the mid 80’s
gp-40’s were used a lot in road service before SD-50thru90’s were built[:)]
but mainly yd and road switching were done with GP-9’s
Thanks! Down here in South Louisiana, they also used RS-3’s in local service. One derailed on my employer’s spur in the late 1960’s and we used a sideboom tractor (used in laying pipelines) to get it back on the track. My father has a couple old slides showing the lifting of the engine.
They also had Alco RS11’s.Back in 1979 an Indiana shortline had two of them still painted for the SP.The SP used to use Fairbank-Morse H24-66’s for freight and commutor trains in California.
A lot of SD9’s in Oregon: http://cbassweb.com/railroads/sp/index.htm
Cajunman I don’t think that the COTTON BELT RS-3s ever left home rails. Or if they did it was not often. What you probably saw were Southern Pacific RSD-5s. The COTTON BELT RS-3s were the only ones on the Espee system.
Cajunman I recommend you take a look at Richard Percy’s website My Espee Modeler’s Home Page. See espee.railfan.net/espee.html Richard has put a lot of effort into that page on the Espee locomotive fleet.
Until the mid 70s SP had ALCo,Baldwin,and FM switchers.They also had FM Trainmasters,GP9s, and SDP 45s in commute service in San Francisco.
They had most 2nd generation diesels,plus a few unique units.They had two versions of Krauss Maffei road diesels,plus 3U50s and 3 DD35Bs.They,and the D&RGW,ran the only tunnel motors built.They also had a very large fleet of SD45s.
I’d like to add that 94 of the tunnel motors had COTTON BELT lettering on their sides.