SP Coast Daylight (1955)SP Coast Daylight (1955)
The page depicts Southern Pacific's Train 98 and 99,
the eastbound (San Francisco to Los Angeles)
and westbound (Los Angeles to San Francisco)
Coast Daylight, respectively,
shortly after Diesels had replaced steam.
(GS-5 number 4458 did the honors of closing out the steam era on
Train 98 on 7 January 1955, having taken Train 99 to
San Francisco for the last time the previous day.)
Challenger Imports
produced a beautiful HO scale model of this train in 1999
(called the Morning Daylight)
in both this relatively full 16-car form and a shorter
10-car consist
typical of off-season operations.
The car numbers in this consist are taken from the model;
the Diesel numbers are typical of what would have been assigned.
Overview
When the new, streamlined when Train 98 and 99 debuted on
21 March 1937, it was simply called the
Daylight.
With the launch of the Train 96 and 97, the
Noon Daylight,
on 30 March 1940,
Train 98 and 99 were rechristened the
Morning Daylight.
After the final run of the Noon Daylight
on 1 October 1949,
Morning became redundant but was nevertheless retained,
until 22 April 1952 when Train 98 and 99 officially became the
Coast Daylight.
Consist
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SP 6034-6045 (Alco PA2, class DP-11). Southern Pacific's Pacific Lines purchased 38 PAs and 13 PBs, but all but the last 12 PA-2s were assigned to West Oakland, which jealously hoarded them for use on trains to Portland and Ogden. Los Angeles had to settle for EMD E7s and a lone E8A, whose lack of dynamic brakes and lower starting tractive effort made them more suitable to the Coast and Sunset route trains powered by Los Angeles-assigned Diesels. Los Angeles finally received a dozen PA-2s in September and October 1953. Three were transferred to West Oakland in spring 1954, but the remainder stayed through the 1950s, gradually augmented beginning in 1955 with older PA-1s from the T&NO and Cotton Belt, none of which had dynamic brakes which made them useless to West Oakland. | ||
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SP 5900-5909 (EMD E7B, class DP-4, later class EP620B-2). While Los Angeles eventually had a sizable number of PAs, no PB-1s nor PB-2s were ever assigned to Los Angeles, so the PAs often ran with E7B booster units. | ||
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SP 6046-6054 (EMD E9A, class DP-12, later class EP624A-1). | ||
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SP 3302 or 3303 (79-CB-1), chair baggage car built by Pullman-Standard in 1939 (lot 6588, plan 7415) when the Daylight was first re-equipped. These cars included a 19'10" long baggage compartment, a news agent counter, and 44 seats. | ||
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SP 2485 (79-C-2), 44-seat chair car, one of four built for the Daylight pool by Pullman-Standard in 1941 (lot 6638, plan 7422A) as part of a group of nine cars. (Two other cars were for San JoaquinDaylight service, while the remaining three were built for the San Francisco Challenger.) | ||
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SP 2357 (83-C-5), chair car built by Pullman-Standard in 1954 (lot 6940, plan 7571B), part of the last group of cars built for the Daylight. | ||
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SP 2352 (83-C-5), chair car built by Pullman-Standard in 1954 (lot 6940, plan 7571B), part of the last group of cars built for the Daylight. | ||
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SP 10316 (83-T-1), tavern built by Pullman-Standard in 1949 (lot 6805, plan 7575) for the Shasta Daylight. | ||
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SP 3002 (79-PR-1), 27-seat parlor car built by Pullman-Standard in 1939 (lot 6591, plan 7420) for the Daylight. | ||
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SP 2953 (79-PRO-1), 22-seat parlor observation built by Pullman-Standard in 1939 (lot 6590, plan 7419) for the Daylight. |
These train images are in a scale of 1 pixel = 12 in and were created by Karl L. Swartz. For more information about them, please see Not Quite Train GIFs.
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All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Daylight drumhead courtesy
The Coach Yard.
Animation implemented using Brian Clough's
Train Gif JavaScript Project
in conjunction with
Dr. Clue's DHTML library
.