Can anyone tell me the year in which UP, SP and ATSF stopped using F-units in freight service including local cq. way freights. I have a number of 50’ freight cars with built dates in the first half of the seventies but I’m not sure if they are correct in a F-unit pulled train.
N,
I can’t tell you much about the others, but Santa Fe had pretty much moved all of their F-units to the Gulf Coast Lines (Texas) by the 70’s. So, the transcontinental mainline freight trains were being pulled mostly by newer units by that point. there were exceptions, though…at a couple of points, the F’s were pressed back into service due to motive power shortages. Of course, the 70’s were also when the F units were being rebuilt into CF-7’s, so the numbers were dwindling.
Hope that helps!
Hello “Nieweboer,”
The Santa Fe continued using its F units well into the 1970s even while it was rebuilding them to CF7 road switchers, eventually numbering 233 units. The CF7 program began at the road’s Cleburne, Texas, shop in February of 1970, and continued until March 1978. At that time, all the available F7 cab units, including passenger units and updated F3s, had been converted, except for one passenger cab and one passenger booster that were saved and eventually donated to the California Railroad Museum. While the CF7 progam was going on, the F units were assigned to lines in Texas so they’d be close to Cleburne. I lived in Austin, Texas, during most of that time, not too far from the Santa Fe’s Fort Worth-to-Houston-and-Galveston line, where it wasn’t unusual to see trains with locomotive consists of six or seven F-unit cabs and boosters.
So long,
Andy
Both the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific said their goodbyes to the F units in 1972. The UP sold their remaining F units to the Rock Island and the Espee retired their last F unit on November 15, 1972.
As far as the UP goes, check out Don Strack’s useful website: http://utahrails.net/all-time/classic-index.php
The years in service is helpful. Click on a loco series, and you can find when they were retired or traded in: http://utahrails.net/all-time/all-time-22.php#f3a-1400a
Make sure you check the renumbering. It looks like the UP traded most of its F-units by 1965, so you wouldn’t see many F-units from '63-'64, save for the F9s sold to the Rock in '72.
Santa Fe had lots of F units around Wichita Kansas in the early 1970s. I remember getting my new camera (1973) and going railfanning. When I went by the north roundhouse I thought, “nothing but a bunch of cummy F units”. Oh, had I only known! Then a few months later I saw the blue-bonnets there. I, of course, did not have my camera with me. As I recall most were gone by 1974. I saw my first CF7 in 1976 while doing geologic field work in Texas.
Santa Fe turned over many passenger F units to Amtrak in 1971.
“Texas Zephyr” wrote: “Santa Fe turned over many passenger F units to Amtrak in 1971.”
The Santa Fe assigned a number of F units to Amtrak trains beginning in May 1971, but the AT&SF retained ownership of these locomotives. Santa Fe historian Lee Berglund wrote in the Santa Fe society’s magazine that “When Amtrak took over passenger service in May 1971, surviving units of the 16 and 37 classes that were to be used in Amtrak service were renumbered into the 300 class. A-units filled some previously vacated ‘L’ numbers as well as newly created numbers 300C through 314C plus 315L. B-units filled vacated numbers and spilled over into the 315AB through 321AB numbers.”
And later in the same article, Lee wrote, “After Amtrak stopped using the 300 class F-units between January and July 1973, the surviving operational units were also transferred to freight service and were renumbered into the 325 class in September.”
So they always belonged to the Santa Fe, and Amtrak was only using them until it could get its own locomotives.
So long,
Andy
Burlington Northern had one of the longest lived F unit fleet. The last BN F unit left the roster in 1982. There were F units from GN, NP, & SP&S on the BN. The former NP f-9’s lasted the longest.
As mentioned earlier the Espee closed out the F unit era in 1972. The last two were F7a 6432 and F7b 8104 and both were in “Black Widow” paint albiet worn and weathered.
"Can anyone tell me the year in which UP, SP and ATSF stopped using F-units in freight service including local cq. way freights. "
Keep in mind that F-units were fine on mainline freights, but weren’t really well suited to way freights, in fact many railroads prohibited their use in way freight service due to visibility issues. That’s part of the reason ATSF created the CF-7’s, to make a road switcher out of F units.