78 CLASSIC TRAINS FALL 2019
The Way It Was Tales from railfans and railroaders
Yellow diesel-hydraulic!
A young Southern Pacific fan is thrilled by the unexpected sighting of a novel diesel
Growing up in the San Francisco
Bay Area, I was influenced by — and
thoroughly enamored of — the Southern
Pacific Co. Admittedly, I missed the hey-
day of steam, solid red-and-orange Day-
light streamliners, and even the early days
of dieseldom, when multi-unit consists of
Black Widow or gray-and-scarlet Elec-
tro-Motive F7s pulled long drags of
40-foot boxcars. Mine was an era of GP9s
and early piggyback with short trailers
loaded onto flatcars, mixed into general
freight trains. Roller-bearing-equipped
cars were clearly in evidence, but “friction
bearing” babbitt-on-brass bearings were
more common.
SP’s modern locomotives in this era
were EMD GP20s, GP30s, lots of GP35s,
General Electric U25Bs, and models from
my favorite builder, Alco, in the form of
RS32s and big C628s. San Francisco, pop-
ulated by Fairbanks-Morse and Alco
switchers, was home to the road’s famous
16-unit roster of Fairbanks-Morse H24-66
Train Masters and their obedient follow-
ing of Harriman heavyweight commute
coaches, along with 45 bi-level gallery
coaches, which, unlike like those on the
Chicago-area railroads that influenced
their construction and acquisition, were
never intended for push-pull service. In
similar fashion to the original Chicago
bi-levels, Southern Pacific pulled the ini-
tial group with steam.
By chance I came into possession of
the October 1961 issue of Trains maga-
zine in the early 1960s, courtesy of my
father, the late Gordon E. Lloyd. I don’t
recall why he had a duplicate copy of that
issue, but he passed it on to me. I read the
cover article, “The Semmering Story,” by
Editor David P. Morgan, multiple times.Morgan recounted the theory behind,
and testing efforts for, six new diesel-hy-
draulic locomotives built by the German
firm Krauss-Maffei. Two American rail-
roads, SP and Denver & Rio Grande
Western, were buying these exotic
machines, hoping they would bring a
two-fold advantage by ushering in a
higher-horsepower locomotive option
while addressing the current limitations
of electric traction as applicable to units
operating on heavy mountain grades.
Designated model ML-4000CC for their
horsepower rating and wheel arrange-
ment, the six units were tested on
Austria’s demanding Semmering grade
before shipment to the United States.
While not fully comprehending all the
technical aspects of locomotive operation
of the early 1960s, I was able to generally
spot different makes and models, and theSurprise! Lettered for new owner Southern Pacific but still wearing Rio Grande colors, diesel-hydraulic 9022 leads an SP F7 on a San Fran-
cisco-bound freight at Millbrae, Calif., on January 30, 1965. Gordon E. Lloyd, Lloyd Transportation Library