Craig's Railroad Pages: The late, great Southern Pacific

Photos taken along the Southern Pacific

Disclaimer: This is NOT an official Southern Pacific web site.

My all-time favorite locomotive is Southern Pacific's light package-equipped SD9E, their home-rebuilt version of EMD's SD9 road switcher. These locomotives were originally built throughout the mid 1950's and seemed to be the SP's locomotive of choice on Oregon's rails during the 70's and early 1980's. Many of them lasted well into the 1990's before finally being retired or sold to shortline railroads. To me, their boxy appearance and high short hoods, with the SP Mars/Gyralights, are what a railroad locomotive is supposed to look like!

As usual, clicking on a photo will present you with a larger version (when one is available).

Photos taken in 1978 through 1981:

In this image, three SD9E's hustle a westbound freight through Milwaukie Oregon. On the SP, directions were determined by whether a train was heading away from San Francisco, California (eastbound) or towards it (westbound) regardless of geographic north (also, mileposts along the tracks were numbered using San Francisco as the Mile 0.0 point). So although this train is actually heading south, for SP's purposes it was westbound.

Incidentally, a siding is NOT a safe place from which to take a picture. It's a good way to get hit by flying debris. I was a little more "devil-may-care" back then than I am now.

Near Gladstone Oregon, I waited one night for a westbound train, hoping to get some nice time-delay pics of streaking lights. Not having a tripod, I set my camera on the roof of my 1976 Toyota Corolla and used a cable release to trip the shutter on the bulb setting, holding it open for various periods. This was one of my first experiments with night photography.

SD9E 4397 at the Roseburg veneer plant at Weed, California. Note the cupola caboose; while not a rarity on the Southern Pacific, it was far outnumbered by the bay window variety in the latter days of caboosedom.

Thank you to Richard Hughes for solving the mystery of where I had taken this picture! I had it marked as an unremembered location and he sent me an email on 2-19-06 to let me know that he had been the conductor on this job. Once he told me where it was taken it all came back to me.

Near Scofield, Oregon, 4370 and four sisters power a train upgrade en route to Tillamook...

...and later pass the water tank at Cochran. I was told that this water tank was the highest in elevation in existence on the entire Southern Pacific Railroad.

A few minutes later, the caboose clears the water tank and the train begins its descent of the Coast Range.

Speaking of cabeese, I caught this one being moved north on 99W entering Tigard, Oregon. A second flatbed rig carried the trucks.

4330 crossing a wooden trestle
south of Newberg, Oregon

4385 - I don't recall the location where this shot was taken.

My favorite slide, mainly because of the memories associated with it, taken of the 4407 and friends south of Banks, Oregon late one evening.

4433 at Banks

4433 again, south of Banks

Custom-printed Photo Wall Calendars and prints are available.

You choose the pictures you want for each month from any of the horizontally-oriented images throughout my website. See my calendar page for more information and ordering instructions.

Individual photos and enlargements may also be purchased. Contact me if you are interested in obtaining copies of any of my photographs or artwork.

Union Pacific, Southern Pacific and Western Pacific are registered trademarks, used under license.