Shooting Eagles

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ISSOURI PACIFIC not only calledits premier trains “Eagles,”but to emphasize the brand,also spread a heraldic eagle

with a wingspan of more than 8 feetacross the noses of its passenger die-sels. Freight units, and Geeps pur-chased with steam generators for dualservice, did not rate the “full eagletreatment”—it was reserved for the fastrunners exclusively.

All told, 23 EMD E-unit and 36 AlcoPA locomotives wore the stainless-steeleagle, and the first systematic project Iundertook as a railroad photographerwas to capture every one of thesewinged creatures on film. In the timeframe under discussion, 1955-60, I wasin high school in Fort Smith, Ark., andthen away at college, far off-line in In-diana. The constraint in the first in-stance was a lack of transportation (no

car) and in the second, mere opportu-nity (distance).

The other limiting factor was thefact that my hometown of Fort Smithwas, to put it politely, not on a big eagleflight path, as MoPac ran just one pairof trains, nameless Nos. 125-126, intotown. Once called the Sunflower, thetrain by then was just a four-car, all-stops maid-of-all-work that required141⁄2 hours of methodical progress to go

M

Far from the main line, Arkansas photographers sought to documentevery one of Missouri Pacific’s cab-unit passenger dieselsBy Louis A. Marre • Photos by the author

© 2013 Kalmbach Publishing Co. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. www.ClassicTrainsMag.com

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between Kansas City and Little Rock.This was a trek of some 525 miles,most if not all of it on jointed rail inblock-signal, train-order territory.

Fortunately for my project, thetrains called at MoPac’s riverside depotin daylight in both directions (at leastin summer): 12:42 p.m. westbound and6:20 p.m. eastbound. The noontimetrain was in good light during the win-ter months, and the evening train wasthe target of choice during summer.

One bit of good luck was tied toMissouri Pacific’s locomotive assign-ment policies of the period. Engineswere not regularly assigned to any onetrain; rather, they were maintained in apool in ever-changing patterns of use.Thus we in Fort Smith had a fair shotat seeing anything on the passenger-diesel roster—with one troublesome ex-ception—if we just kept going down tothe depot often enough.

Noting this rotation of power, we(almost every other railroad fan intown shared in this project at one pointor another) determined to photograph

every one of the aforementioned 59units. We were all aware that the singleexception would be the 7100, a uniqueunit with an E6A carbody but only one1000 h.p. engine inside instead of thenormal two. This was Electro-MotiveDivision’s AA model (AA6 to the Mo-Pac), a counterpart to Rock Island’s twoAB6’s, which had the same machineryas a standard E6 but lacked conven-tional cabs and therefore the longsnouts of the early E-unit carbodies.

The 7100 was known to be perma-nently assigned to the little Delta Eagleover on the other side of Arkansas, andnot likely, by virtue of that duty and itsmeager horsepower, ever to appear onNos. 125-126. Apart from this oddity,all the other eagle-bedecked passengerunits were fair game and would appearin front of a camera in Fort Smithsooner or later.

I kept a list. One by one, I wouldcheck off the numbers as unit after unitwas committed to film. To do this, Iused a truly eclectic variety of cameras:secondhand postcard-size Kodaks; a

borrowed 4x5 Graflex; two Kodak 616Monitor folding cameras; and a twin-lens reflex copied by Ansco from ex-pired Rolleiflex patents.

Under the limitations of scroungingrides to the depot, finding time in anormal high-school schedule, waitingfor the rain to stop, and a thousandother impediments, I and my friendsachieved our aim in about two years.Our work was just in time, too, as Mis-souri Pacific pulled the plug on our lit-tle train at the spring timetable changein 1960. Thus did the window of op-portunity close to just a crack—St.Louis, Kansas City, or Little Rock be-came the preferred venues for eagle-hunting, and we could not go there onjust any old afternoon.

An aside about a neighbor, please:Observant readers will note, in thebackground of a couple of these photosat MoPac’s depot, Pullman-green pas-senger equipment of our town’s otherpassenger railroad, the St. Louis-SanFrancisco. “The Frisco’s” station and di-vision office building stood directly op-

Pure and vintage Missouri Pacific, train No. 125 cruises majestically overFrog Bayou between Alma and Van Buren, Ark. (top left), not far from ourhometown of Fort Smith, on September 13, 1958, with four heavyweightblue-and-gray cars and an attractive Alco PA up front, its big eagle gleam-

ing in the sun. On a gray March 27, 1960, E8 7020 exits the ArkansasRiver bridge with train 125 (above). This was the last day of service forthe Kansas City-Fort Smith-Little Rock run, and by the end of the decade,the bridge also would be gone, a victim of a river navigation project.

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posite Missouri Pacific’s more modeststructure. In this period, Fort Smithalso saw just one Frisco train each waya day, originating in Paris, Texas, andjoining the Lawton, Okla.-St. Louis Me-teor at Monett, Mo., to the west ofSpringfield. Service south to Paris ter-minated during the course of our Mis-souri Pacific eagle-hunting activities,but the Fort Smith-Monett segmentsurvived. We dubbed it “the Meteorite.”

At Monett, the Fort Smith-St. Louissleeping car was tacked onto the rear ofthe eastbound Meteor, and its counter-part car was removed from the west-bound Meteor for the return to FortSmith. The standard Meteorite consistwas four cars: a green heavyweight ex-press car, a baggage-RPO combination,a coach, and a River-series 14-4 sleeper.

Frisco’s top passenger power, 23 Eunits, had their own cachet by virtue of

being painted red and named after fa-mous horses, but we couldn’t shoot thehorses the way we shot the eagles. As arule, the red-and-gold horses wouldstray only occasionally from Frisco’sfast tracks—the St. Louis-OklahomaCity-Lawton, St. Louis-Memphis, andKansas City-Memphis-Birmingham mainlines—and the Fort Smith train usuallyhad one or two of Frisco’s dozen black-and-yellow, dual-purpose FP7’s, or on

Rarest of the eagle E units were the four “slant-nosed” models—two E3A’sand two E6A’s purchased, along with lightweight trainsets, by the MoPacfor what became its trademark Eagle service. Representing this 1940 gen-eration is E6A 7003, built (as part of two E6A-B sets) in October 1941, forthe St. Louis-Denver Colorado Eagle. Long since removed from that premiertrain for more mundane duties, 7003 is backing No. 126 off the wye at the

Fort Smith stop in August ’58. Trains arrived in Fort Smith over a 4-milebranch from the main line at Greenwood Junction, Okla., crossed the Ar-kansas River on a bridge, and wyed into the station so as to head out overthe same bridge and retrace their route to the junction. This branch had anearly CTC installation so the swing into Fort Smith was not as time-con-suming as it would have been if all the switches had to be thrown by hand.

Standing on the outbound leg of the wye, train125 is still loading mail and express on a June1957 day. In charge is one of Missouri Pacific’s14 E7A’s, the most numerous of its postwarEMD E unit models, acquired gradually during1945-48. The portholed side panels on the E7’s(including the 8 E7B’s) are a MoPac hallmark, asignature item in Raymond Loewy’s design ofthe road’s first streamliner, the 1940 Eagle (re-named Missouri River Eagle in 1941) thatlinked St. Louis, Kansas City, and Omaha, andits two E3A’s, 7000 and 7001. MoPac, and affil-iate Texas & Pacific, continued to special-orderportholes on their E7’s, eschewing EMD’s stan-dard rectangular windows. When EMD intro-duced the successor E8, it adopted portholes asstandard!

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Fine feathersCOMPLIMENTS ARE DUE the Missouri Pacific Railroad, post facto,

for sticking with its glorious aluminum eagle decoration ondiesel noses after the first two Eagle streamliners of the early 1940’s.A key element in designer Raymond Loewy’s “look” for the original1940 trainsets, the metal eagle adorned not only the noses of theirE3’s, 7000 and 7001, but also the rounded rear end of the parlor-ob-servation cars, 750 and 751. An important detail to note is that theE3’s, and MoPac’s two E6A’s on the 1942 Colorado Eagle, lackednose doors, so those units’ eagles were one-piece decorations. Thelater E7’s, E8’s, and Alco PA’s all had nose doors, requiring the eaglebe a three-piece item.

Also of note is what these metal eagles “carried on their breast,”if you will: the well-known circular Missouri Pacific Lines “buzzsaw”logo. This was not quite always the case, for the eagles on Texas & Pa-

cific’s 10 E7A’s and 8 E8A’s woreT&P’s diamond emblem. More-over, soon after the ColoradoEagle hit the road, the eagles onthe noses of E6A’s 7002 and7003 carried a buzzsaw with thetrain name. The two participatingrailroads’ names were spelledout below the wings: Missouri Pa-cific on the engineer’s side of thenose, Rio Grande on the fire-man’s side. This changed afterthe war when MP got more Eunits and began to take advan-

tage of the diesel’s flexibility by assigning various units to the train,and the E6’s nose eagles then got the standard “Missouri PacificLines” buzzsaw.

Remarkably, several eagles, on both E’s and PA’s, survived the re-painting of their units into the 1960’s “Downing Jenks era” solid blue,and a few eagles, including on E6A No. 11 and at least one PA, stilladorned noses of units after they were given new two-digit identifica-tions (44-79 for the Alcos) in the 1962 system renumbering program.

Finally, there was one more MoPac passenger conveyance wearingeagles: American Car & Foundry streamlined motor car 670 (above).Affectionately dubbed the “Eaglet” and also styled, inside and out, byLoewy, this double-ended car—yes, it sported an eagle on each end—was built in March 1942 to serve as the Union-Lincoln, Nebr., branch-line connection to the mainline streamliner. Patterned after 1940 carsfor the New York, Susquehanna & Western, MoPac 670 moved southin the mid-’50’s to replace AA 7100 on the old Delta Eagle run, andwas not scrapped until 1960.—J. David Ingles

Having just completed its backup move down the cross leg of the wye, E77011 is pulling forward on the outbound portion and will make its stationstop in about two car-lengths. When it does, a mountain of mail waits tobe loaded. This is the shortest regular consist: one RPO-express car, onecombination baggage-coach, and one coach. When MoPac’s small fleet of

combines ran low, a full baggage car and two coaches made up the “big”four-car set. The bridge visible is a highway crossing of the Arkansas River.MoPac’s bridge, once a combination rail-and-highway bridge before thepictured road bridge was built, is parallel to it at the point where the wyetrack 7011 is entering meets its other leg—about 100 yards to the left.

The “Eaglet” met the big bird at Union, Nebr. (above); the “buzzsaw” onthe Colorado Eagle’s E6’s nose decorations (left) carried the train name.

RO B E RT MI L N E R

RI C K CH U R C H

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I did not fully appreciate how fortunate I was to undertake my “shoot ’emall” project on the Missouri Pacific until much later. Where else wouldAlco’s handsome PA’s outnumber EMD’s more common E’s in that part ofthe world? Certainly not on the Frisco—it had no Alco passenger units.The Missouri-Kansas-Texas, over in Oklahoma, had them aplenty, but by

the time I undertook my MoPac project, most of the Katy PA’s were rust-ing hulks in the weeds at the Parsons (Kans.) shop. In soft evening light,the sight of that famous nose with the stainless-steel eagle emblazonedupon it was truly impressive. Train 126 is under the guidance of PA1 8009in mid-July 1957, and I’ve checked one more number off the “wanted list.”

The noontime call of No. 125 was the only one in daylight in midwinter, and onChristmas Day 1956, it has drawn one of the final-order PA’s. MoPac bought the18 units of this 1952 group solely because they could be delivered quickly, where-as EMD was still working about a year behind orders. Further, MP wanted largesteam-generator capacity, because it still operated many steam-ejector air-condi-tioning systems on older rolling stock and needed as much steam in midsummeras it did in midwinter . . . and Alco provided truly heroic boiler capacities in itslast incarnation of the PA model. These are the units persistently called “PA3’s” bysome, though they are in fact still DL-304 specification and thus model PA2, de-spite the simplified grille and trim package that might suggest a change of model.Inside, all is still as it was: 2250 h.p. from a 16-244 prime mover. All this aside,8021 was a true Christmas present—another unit off the “wanted” list.

The appearance in Fort Smith of a PA that we’d not already pho-tographed moved us to heroic measures, even if conditions werenot quite ideal for photography. This portrait of No. 8005 re-quired the services of a No. 5 Sylvania flashbulb (about the sizeof a 150-watt incandescent) and a tripod. And as a bonus, we’vealso caught the engineer ascending to his throne to guide train126 out of town. It was early March 1957, pitch dark, and rain-ing—but we could mark one more unit off the list.

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occasion an E unit and an FP7.(There was one period of exception,

but by then I was up north at college.For a short time into fall 1960, Friscoassigned two E7’s to the Fort Smith-Monett and Monett-Wichita trains, andafter the latter was discontinued, theFort Smith train got steam-generator-equipped GP7’s, which were, of course,black. When the train began runningthrough Monett and on to Springfield,the FP7’s returned.)

It is hardly necessary to belabor thepoint that not only are the MoPactrains and locomotives with the big ea-gles long gone, but so is the MoPacFort Smith depot, the Arkansas Riverbridge and branch line by which thetrains reached it, and of course, theMissouri Pacific Railroad itself.

All are one with the snows of yester-year. y

Raising dust and commotion through the stockyards at West Fort Smith,Okla., MoPac PA 8025—seventh of the final order of 18—and the four-carconsist of No. 125 are smoking along over the CTC-protected 4-mile

branch between the Arkansas River and Greenwood Junction on a briskMarch noontime in 1960, just a few days before the end of the service.The river bridge itself is visible above the stockpens at the left.

The penultimate E unit on Missouri Pacific’s roster drew the melancholy assignment of poweringthe final run of train 125 from Little Rock to Kansas City. A retired engineer has come down toreminisce with the crew before MoPac’s Fort Smith depot falls silent forever. It is a gloomy March27, 1960, and no such eagle-shooting project will be undertaken by anyone in Fort Smith again.

GO R D O N B. MO T T