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Cotton Belt Locomotives by Joseph Strapac with dust jacket
Cotton Belt Locomotives by Joseph Strapac
Hard Cover with dust jacket. Dust jacket has damage
Copyright 1977 FIRST PRINTING
243 pages
CONTENTS
1. History 1
2. Shortlines Absorbed 17
3. Narrow-Gauge Locomotives 30
4. Steam Switchers 41
5. Eight-Wheelers 48
6. Atlantics 60
7. Moguls 66
8. Ten-Wheelers 80
9. Consolidations 94
10. Mountains 114
11. Northerns 126
12. Motor Cars 142
13. Diesel Passenger 152
14. Freight Cab Units 162
15. Diesel Switchers 176
16. Freight Hood Units 192
17. The Roster 221
A little-known narrow-gauge empire consisting of over seven hundred miles of three-fool rail, stretching from the southern tip of Illinois to Fort Worth, Texas, was the genesis of today's St. Louis Southweslern Railway, better known as the Cotton Belt. Envisioned by capitalists in East Texas and St. Louis as an outlet for the agricultural production of the Lone Star State, lhe slim-gauge pike was pushed to completion in 1883 as a challenge to Jay Gould's Iron Mountain-Missouri Pacific monopoly. For a few short years, seven dozen little moguls and eight-wheelers tiptoed over light rail until standard-gauging was accomplished almost overnight. By the late eighties, the line was absorbed into the loose family of Gould roads, where it remained until the twenties. A flirtation with the Katy and KCS might have led lo a merger, but instead the line fell into the hands of the Soulhern Pacific, which loday holds almost every share of Cotton Belt stock.
The Railway was and is far more than an obscure extension of the Southern Pacific, operating hand-me-down locomotives on rusty rail. In fact, the Colton Belt has never owned a secondhand Espee engine. In sleam days it owned a distinctive roster based upon 2-8-0s for freight, 4-6-0s for passengers, and moguls for switching, and by 1930, superpower arrived in the form of ten Baldwin 4-8-4s, which were later copied in the road's own shops. During the late forties and early fifties, the Cotton Belt ordered its own diesels and chose some models (like the Baldwin centercab and Alco RS-3) never seen on the Southern Pacific itself. Since 1953, however, SSW diesels have been obtained as part of Espee orders, and today the rosler is uniformly EMD, with mosl of the horsepower being generaled by late-model 645 engines; only a few unils date back as far as 1957.
Cotton Belt Locomotives, then, documenls a proud and independent tradition going back a full century when lhe eighteen-ton "Gov. Hubbard" was first fired up on the ancestral Tyler Tap Railroad in northeastern Texas. More than three hundred photographs, dozens of official diagrams, and four maps illustrate the seventeen chaplers. A thorough text briefly delineates the history of the Railway and its antecedents, while individual chapters are presented on passenger motor cars, narrow gauge, all eight wheel arrangements of standard gauge sleam (from 0-6-0 to 4-8-4), and each of the major types of diesel power, bringing to print the entire hundred-year development of the locomotive fleet and the Railway itself in words and pictures. Included is an all-time roster of every sleam and diesel locomotive owned by the Cotton Belt and its predecessors. It's all here: the first and only complete sludy of the motive power of the Southwest's most successful railway!
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