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Southern Pacific Review 1980 By Joseph Strapac Soft Cover 1981 128 Pages
Southern Pacific Review 1980 By Joseph Strapac Soft Cover Copyright 1981 128 Pages
CONTENTS
New Locomotives from Old 3
Farewell to Espee's Alco Fleet 18
A Frank Peterson Photo Retrospective 51
Recruits: 1980 56
The Visitors 60
Espee Tourists on Foreign Rails 66
The Graduates 70
The Roster: May 1, 1980 78
The Roster in Pictures 80
Standing at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers in the northwest corner of the City of Sacramento is an assemblage of obviously elderly, red brick buildings of imposing stature. Lost as they are between river levee and freeway flyovers and tracks of the passenger stations, these impressive stuctures aren't often included in a typical tour of California's capital city. But, just as much as the freshly-restored structures a few blocks south in Old Sacramento, these buildings are part of the city's rich heritage; here is the longtime home of Southern Pacific's locomotive fleet. For more than eleven decades, the Railroad has maintained, modified, and even manufactured its locomotives within the shop buildings at Sacramento.
In its halcyon days, when titled Sacramento General Shops, there was no task too large or too small: in fact, nowhere else west of the Rockies were road-specification steam locomotives ever built from the wheels up. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, and again between 1917 and 1930, Southern Pacific found it expedient to erect brand-new locomotives within these walls.
Today, however, only the outer shells of the buildings remain the same; car work has been removed to nearby Roseville, and the facility is known as the Sacramento Locomotive Works. But a renaissance of sorts has occurred during the past decade, kindling intense pride among the people working here: for a wide variety of reasons (to be examined below) Southern Pacific has turned Sacramento General into a full-fledged locomotive works, where old ones come in and new ones leave. In many ways, they are even better than new, as we shall see.
In its unspectacular way, with little fanfare, the Sacramento Locomotive Works has turned out 567 completely rebuilt and upgraded locomotives in the ten years since February of 1970, a production total for this type of work (above and beyond routine maintenance requirements) unmatched anywhere except at Paducah. Another ninety-four locomotives were remanufactured at Houston, utilizing some parts supplied by Sacramento, and another sixty have been reworked off Company premises.
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