Capote: In Cold Blood -- Yellow Trains of the Santa Fe

[wjstix]

Keep in mind that ATSF's freight scheme was blue and yellow. It may be if you primarily saw trains coming towards you at grade crossings, the yellow would make a strong impression....

http://img.kansasmemory.org/thumb500/00069428.jpg

 

[wjstix]

Milwaukee Road switched from orange and maroon to UP-yellow and gray as part of the deal to handle UP trains between Omaha and Chicago, after the UP dropped the deal with CNW in 1955 (IIRC).

[rjemery]

Fred,

Certainly reefers are a possibility, but I have discovered there are other roads with yellow liveries.  The D&RGW had yellow locomotives as well as the Milwaukee Road.

Moreover, UP's City of St Louis, with their yellow passenger cars, ran on Wabash tracks between St Louis and Kansas City, pulled by a Wabash power displaying a UP herald on the lead locomotive.  The UP had a Kansas mainline between Kansas City and Cheyenne, WY, via Salina, KS, and Denver, CO.

See 1950 UP system map.  Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_St._Louis_%28train%29

[dakotafred]

I have a perhaps-better candidate for Capote's "yellow trains": reefer blocks. From which, again, he generalized, so characterizing all Santa Fe trains.

[dakotafred]

lvt1000

Maybe Capote saw a blue and yellow freight train so you might be splitting the hair a little too thin. Its an error of perception (if that's possible) and little more. Now the railroad geography is another question and hopefully Kansas fanatics will solve that for you.

LVT's is the sensible solution. Capote picked up on the freight engine colors and generalized from there. People who look at railroads only casually and occasionally -- even professional writers -- are always doing things like that.

[lvt1000]

Maybe Capote saw a blue and yellow freight train so you might be splitting the hair a little too thin. Its an error of perception (if that's possible) and little more. Now the railroad geography is another question and hopefully Kansas fanatics will solve that for you.

 

[aricat]

 It could be entirely possible that Mr. Capote may have seen a detouring UP train using Santa Fe between Kansas City and Denver Colorado. The UP between Kansas City and Denver is single track beyond Topeka. Union Pacific ran two passenger trains across Kansas in 1959; the City of St Louis and the Portland Rose. The two closest UP stations to Holcomb Kansas were Winona and Sharon Springs Kansas; both located on US40. This, of course, is entirely speculation on my part. Railroads did occasionally detour on each others lines.

[Deggesty]

Perhaps Mr. Capote's eyes were jaundiced when he saw a train going across Kansas, and so it looked yellow?

[NorthWest]

The UP's City of St. Louis ran through Kansas City on the way to LA, it was operated by Wabash crews and power St.L-KC, on the Wabash, but retained UP cars. From Chicago, I don't think there was a train operated via KC with UP cars, but I could be mistaken. 

[timz]

If they rode Chicago to Kansas City, it wasn't on a UP train unless they went the long way, via Denver. UP-yellow trains ran Denver to Kansas City-- no other UP streamliners in Kansas.

[NorthWest]

On this webpage, scroll down to the bottom (1944) map. This details the several UP lines in Kansas.  

[rjemery]

Thanks for your contribution, but I didn't ask if the UP ran through Garden City and/or Holcomb, KS.  I wish to know if the UP operated passenger trains between its mainline and any major city in Kansas, Kansas City in particular.  I don't have a railroad atlas or timetable I can consult.

[timz]

Far as any of us knows, that's a mistake. SFe runs thru Holcomb and UP never did.

[rjemery]

In the Winter of 1959-1960, what major Kansas cities were served by Union Pacific passenger trains?

I just finished reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, about the murder of a farming family in Holcomb, Kansas, a town located on the then Santa Fe mainline, although no Santa Fe trains made routine stops there.  Stops were made in nearby Garden City.

Capote writes (page 5):  "Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans - in fact, few Kansans -- had ever hear of Holcomb.  Like the waters of the {Arkansas} river, like the motorists on the highway [US 50], and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings had never stopped there."

Yellow trains?  To my knowledge, all Santa Fe passenger trains at that time were streamlined silver with only some yellow in the locomotive warbonnet livery.  Freight locomotives may have been blue and yellow, but far more blue than yellow.

The only passenger trains I could think of with a yellow livery were those of the Union Pacific, and I was wondering if Capote and his research assistant, Harper Lee, might have rode a UP train between Chicago and Kansas City before taking a Santa Fe train to Garden City, if indeed that is how they traveled.

Capote bills his book as a non-fiction novel but also "a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences."  Nevertheless, I caught several factual errors, not just among his description of the trains passing through Holcomb.  Regardless, the book is a chilling account of the killings and of the others the Holcomb killers shared on Death Row in the penitentiary.