ryan01.htm

Date: 01/14/05
Nostalgic PLA Equipment Move Part 1 - The Eve
Author: espeeboy

Time to chime in with my photos from last Saturday's run of the once in a lifetime all PLA Museum equipment move from West Oakland to Niles Canyon Railway Museum. Believe it or not but this will be part one of seven total threads covering this equipment move (try condensing 800 photos into a few threads!). Took me a while to get through all of them but I still think it is worth posting now a week later (lots of email requests for these photos - thanks for bearing with me).
~~~
As you may know, for a few years (decades?) the PLA (Pacific Locomotive Association) has had various freight rolling stock, passenger cars and a few locomotives sitting with a storage yard here in West Oakland on former Oakland Army base grounds. Various indivduals who work with the 1:1 scale model RR schtuff have saved these various pieces of equipment from seeing the scrapper with the intentions of seeing them put in a museum someday. Thanks to the PLA's Niles Canyon Railway Museum http://www.ncry.org/home.htm moving ahead at a good pace with their own land and best of all private right-of-way (former SP main between Niles Junction and Hearst), all of this equipment finally had a more permanent place to go. Well of course this is the easier said than done version of the story with having to coordinate running a Museum "hospital train" over the U.P.. I'd still like to hear more behind the scenes info on what it exactly took over these last few years to get this move a reality but I'll leave that open to any of you reading this "in the know" as some say.

Moving on now - on Thursday 01.06.05, the PLA in conjunction with the Oakland Terminal Ry (OTR) assembled a seventeen car, five locomotive museum equipment relocation train made of various pieces of rolling stock from the 1920's on up through the 60's (how old is that woodie GFEX/FGEX boxcar by the way?). The assembled train with good air hoses, lubed and FRA inspected roller and friction bearing axles was assembled together in the following train consist:

SPX5472 - restored Black Widow EMD SD9/SD9E (1956)
WP713 - dead in consist but operational EMD GP7 (1953)
SPX5623 - restored Black Widow EMD GP9, ex-SP GP9E passenger "Torpedo" (1955)
U.S. ARMY 1856 - dead in consist Fairbanks Morse H12-44 (1953)
OTR101 - dead in consist Oakland Terminal Ry's Baldwin DS-4-4-1000 (1948)
MILWXXXXX - Milwaukee 50' steel boxcar (19XX)
UP904253 - Union Pacific converted MOW baggage car (19XX)
SP693558 - Southern Pacific Pacific Car & Foundry 50' boxcar (196X)
SP693772 - Southern Pacific Pacific Car & Foundry 50' boxcar (196X)
EP&S139 - El Paso & Southwestern Pullman 60' Observation passenger car (1923)
USNXXXXX - Navy six-axle flatcar (19XX)
SP100752 - Southern Pacific 50' boxcar (19XX)
PFEXXXXX - Pacific Fruit Exchange 50' reefer (19XX)
ATSF149100 - Santa Fe 50' steel boxcar (19XX)
SFRD11998 - Santa Fe 50' ice Reefer (19XX)
GATX37070 - short 40' tankcar (19??)
SF1861 - heavyweight passenger car (19??)
SP5002 - Southern Pacific combo baggage dorm (19XX)
ATSF505 - Santa Fe Pullman-Standard 80' Dome Lounge passenger car (1950)
SP6719 - Southern Pacific Pacific Car & Foundry 60' Twin Door Baggage Car (1960)
GFEX58412 - General Fruit Exchange 50' woodside reefer (mistakenly marked FGEX?)
SSW40 - Cotton Belt Wide-Vision cupola caboose International Car & Foundry (1963)