1941 City of Los Angeles

[bob turner]

By the way, I looked at my Kratville books, and could find no 3-hole F3-A units in UP yellow, and none with the grey halfway down the vents. I would post mine, but without handrails and flat black where they should be grey, not sure I can handle the inevitable comments. I have a 3- unit UP set and a 2-unit SP set, all with F3 roof fans, but some with F7 louvers. Used to run great!

[sarge]

The TCA is really not remotely a good resource for O Scale history. They believe the toy train world is responsible for and should be credited for the creation of scale hobby, which is absolute nonsense. The research is impatient, plagiaristic, and written by toy collectors who for some reason want to lump us in their world without so much as a by your leave, when these are two distinct hobbies separated by a common gauge. I must admit regretting and at times resenting their pillow-handed attempts to own us; their insistence we are one and the same, a broad church, and all the other banalities that are pure twaddle.

The whole schtick is akin to if stamp collectors started claiming they invented coin collecting merely on the basis both use those blue books. There are days when I really wish the TCA would just butt out. They know not our world.

[up148]

Absolutely great prototype photos Jim! I've never seen those photos of F units pulling UP passenger trains......I must start going online and quit using my books only. You've nailed the F3/F7 phases and upgrades through the years. Once the E8/9's became available in early 50's, the F units were relegated to freight work, so it's pretty neat seeing them pulling "name" passenger trains.

I know very little about Atwater/GM models, but it's easy to see they were the cats meow back in the day. How do they run? If you decide to repaint, I may have some correct UP diesel CHAMP decals and you're welcome to them.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

The TCA is really not remotely a good resource for O Scale history. They believe the toy train world is responsible for and should be credited for the creation of scale hobby, which is absolute nonsense. The research is impatient, plagiaristic, and written by toy collectors who for some reason want to lump us in their world without so much as a by your leave, when these are two distinct hobbies separated by a common gauge. I must admit regretting and at times resenting their pillow-handed attempts to own us; their insistence we are one and the same, a broad church, and all the other banalities that are pure twaddle.

You are entirely too nice,

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I must start going online and quit using my books only.

Books are nice but they inevitably reflect the biases of their authors; there is so much information and so many photos now on-line that you can fall into quite a rabbit hole looking for and at them all.....but information is out there to be had and used.

[sarge]

Sorry Rufus, but books done before the internet are far superior. Anyone can put any bullshit they want on a website, unvetted, uncritiqued, and unreferenced, and it searches with the same importance as that which has survived peer review.

The internet is a wasteland of pure undiluted arse-gravy in the main with the odd diamond floating within. Your job, stand up to your neck in it and feel around.

Images are better, and I love a good image search, but “information” on the internet? Mostly loose-stool water being passed off as stout.

[De Bruin]

Awesome rant there Sarge, I'm mopping the coffee off of my client screen now........

"...arse-gravy"

Extremely florid and ornate profanity is apparently a talent, if not indeed a super-power, military veterans retain after their service,
and one (as my brother will tell you) I appreciate greatly.
And yes agreed one does have to sift and strain a lot of feculent liquid to find that occasional gem on the internet.

I'm currently working on an art history project on the old testament that has had me virtually wandering the desert of the "inter-web" for hours trying to identify the names of specific artists associated with otherwise well known curated works. Amazing amount of misinformed and contradictory material out there.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Sorry Rufus, but books done before the internet are far superior.

Sure they are! But author bias still rages on starting back when paper was invented.

The internet is a wasteland of pure undiluted arse-gravy in the main with the odd diamond floating within. Your job, stand up to your neck in it and feel around.

Yes, most of it's crap......not unlike most of the world's published literature if you lump all of it together. Just because it's in a book prior to 1980 doesn't gild it in perfection, value, or trustworthiness.

Images are better, and I love a good image search, but “information” on the internet? Mostly loose-stool water being passed off as stout.

Images are what I was alluding to, and images are information, and even those are frequently misidentified so you find rubbish....

Thank you again for reminding me to stop wasting my time here too.

[sarge]

Sure they are! But author bias still rages on starting back when paper was invented.

Just because it's in a book prior to 1980 doesn't gild it in perfection, value, or trustworthiness.

No, but no-one ever said this was a yes-no proposition. I would say those books have a far higher level of trustworthiness on average than the faeces masquerading as “historical research” on the net on average.

At least before the internet author bias (maybe better termed as interpretation or thesis) was subject to editorial review during the publishing process and peer review after. For example, we all know Lucius Beebe wrote absolutely beautiful yet impatiently researched books. Still, a lot more there than on “Jim’s Pennsy Page”.

The first nail in the coffin of scholarship was desktop publishing, allowing crap, that would have otherwise never seen the light of day, to get into print without meeting some metric of publishability, followed by self-publishing and self-distribution where there were no limits on the exposure to all of this so-called body of knowledge.

It has often been said all human knowledge is available on the internet, all of it at one’s fingertips. Probably true, but it is diluted to insignificance by all human capacity for delusion, distortion, and dreams of adulation focussed on one’s own genius (genius by their own admission). Remove editorial and peer review and the result can hardly be called a superior resource for research as alluded to:

Books are nice but they inevitably reflect the biases of their authors; there is so much information and so many photos now on-line that you can fall into quite a rabbit hole looking for and at them all.....but information is out there to be had and used.

Or perhaps clarity eluded and you weren’t championing the internet over books?

[ScaleCraft]

I am so tired of you folks picking o the Trash Collectors of America. They are such a trustworthy group, supporting things like "pricing guides" that have no basis in fact but are highly useful to show your individual brilliance if you flash a copy at a TCA meet.

You need to understand the concept of importance here.
First, you get to show up at York, on member days, which tells everyone your base status!

After one year, you get an "outhouse" pin to show you new status, and that your nose can't yet pick out which widow to rip off.
5-year is a trashcan pin (looks like Oscar the Grouch, without Oscar).
10-year pin is a dumpster, available only after demonstrating your ability to actually, well, dive dumpsters and come up with some rusty broken piece of sheet which you then claim to be the Lost Artifact of good ol' Josh hisself.

Come on, get with the program!

[R.K. Maroon]

Absolutely great prototype photos! I've never seen those photos of F units pulling UP passenger trains

I don't think I had either, but I like them! Here's another, just because:


This photo is credited to Chris Zygmunt, and can be found on railpictures.net:

https://railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=612362

The website say that this was a Boy Scout special, taken at Lake Palmer, Colorado. That is south of Denver. UP didn't own trackage there, as far as I know. Any ideas?

[ScaleCraft]

Absolutely great prototype photos! I've never seen those photos of F units pulling UP passenger trains

I don't think I had either, but I like them! Here's another, just because:


This photo is credited to Chris Zygmunt, and can be found on railpictures.net:

https://railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=612362

The website say that this was a Boy Scout special, taken at Lake Palmer, Colorado. That is south of Denver. UP didn't own trackage there, as far as I know. Any ideas?

Two lines from Denver roughly parallel, through Palmer Lake, don't know where Lake Palmer is.
I think the other line is the Big, New Santa Fe.

[up148]

Great photo Jim and one I've never seen. Looks like it was taken in the early to mid 50's, as the F3's were delivered with smooth (passenger) pilots and that lead unit (later phase F3) has the freight pilot. Also, due to the weeds between the rails that can hardly be a main line....sure hope not.

[up148]

Here is the "as imported" KEY F3 with passenger pilot. Back in the day it bothered me that it only came with this pilot which wasn't very long lived. Solved it by finding an F7 pilot and installing it on my F3 in the 90's. Now these will work fine with my Wasatch cars, even though it should be pulling pre-streamliner cars.

[R.K. Maroon]

I re-read the information on the website. The photo was taken in 1960, so that might explain the freight pilot on the F3. From what I have read, UP would still use them on occasion for passenger service despite having been re-geared for freight.

The caption says it's a Boy Scout special "run through", which explain the UP in Palmer Lake. I would guess it's heading to Raton, New Mexico, which is near the big Philmont scout camp. I would have guessed the tracks are CB&Q Colorado Southern, but Raton is on the Santa Fe. Lots of speculation here, but cool train either way.