When and where did the “diesel that did it” actually do it?

When former Senior Editor Matt Van Hattem and I talked about this map last year, we figured it would be relatively easy to do.  After all, it would celebrate the 75^th anniversary of the FT diesel’s epic tour and be based on the map that ran in the February, 1960 issue of Trains.           

My idea was to build on the existing map and add an itinerary consisting of the dates and mileage on each railroad.  Piece a cake, right?            

Fool that I was, given the significance of the tour, I figured the information would be readily available. A series of emails, web and library searches, and phone calls revealed otherwise.  Diesel expert Lou Marre wrote, “The itinerary must have existed in EMC records somewhere, but it has long been sought yet I have never seen or even heard of anyone who had seen one.”            

Mr. Marre pointed me to the late Wallace Abbey, who had been working on the definitive FT book.  Marre said the manuscript had been lost due to a computer accident. I learned Abbey’s photos had been donated to the Center for Railroad Photography and Art, so I contacted its president, Scott Lothes, who then contacted Abbey’s family who graciously shared some of Abbey’s surviving FT manuscript.            

Abbey wrote, “It's doubtful that we'll ever reconstruct the full exploits of the 103 (the FT). The complete record seems lost."  But he did provide some interesting tidbits: 

• Time and again, the chronicles of this 11-month sojourn have been based on an EMD publication titled, 83,000 Miles: Now the Story Can be Told…
• But the thing is, 83,000 Miles sometimes took indecent liberties with the facts…
• It chronicled only some of the exploits of the 103 on no more than 16 railroads; Electro-Motive was exclaiming that the 103 had visited 25 class 1 properties. Only those railroads the publication covered, not all the railroads on which the 103 was tested, were represented in the commonly published map of the 103’s demonstrations…
• …83,000 Miles had failed to mention that twice during its 11-month barnstorming tour half or all of the 103 had been hauled back to La Grange for redesign and refit. Nor had 83,000 Miles acknowledged any of the multitude of lesser problems that had cropped up around the 103 during the tests. 

So “indecent liberties” notwithstanding, 83,000 Miles was the book from which the Trains 1960 map was originally derived. 

Theresa Millitello of the National Museum of Transport, proud owners of one of the original FT A-units, (and now an FT B-unit) kindly scanned their copy of 83,000 Miles for me.  The map included the months in 1939-40 where the FT toured and I included them in the Map of the Month.  These were hardly specific but they may well be as close as we’re ever going to get to knowing where the demos were running.

Withers Publishing’s “The Revolutionary Diesel, EMC’s FT” was chock full of great FT facts and I borrowed freely from it.  One of the first things that popped out contrary to the 1960 map was that, “although it apparently was intended to go to Atlanta and Birmingham, Southern’s records do not indicate that these runs occurred.”  So I deleted Atlanta and Birmingham.

There are other tweaks to the map I added according to Abbey like the SP in California and the PRR in Indiana. 

I’m sure there were more trips on other lines, but when and where? 

There comes a time in every publication where you just have to go with what you’ve got.  I’ve also learned throughout the years that the best way to get information out of the woodwork is to publish.

Like they said in the tv show The X-Files, “the truth is out there.”  Maybe in a forgotten file drawer in somebody’s basement or an overlooked archive in a warehouse, museum or library, wherever it is, this, the 75^th anniversary of the epic trip, would be a mighty fine time for the true itinerary of the FT to surface.

Anybody?

ONE MORE THING

I could really use a steam-era track chart of the SP Sacramento Division from Roseville to Reno.