Cotton Belt Passenger train with Bradley Coaches

[Nato]

        Not in Cotton Belt Territory this very short passenger train was photographed on the mostly finished (no ballast) portion of my layout in Salt Lake, by Bob Gilmore. The GP 7 from Atlas is a model of the only Daylight Painted Geep used by Cotton Belt on passenger trains. The coaches are of course from Rapido of Canada.    Nate Goodman (Nato).

[CBQ Fan]

I just got my coach from rapido today!  Very nice!

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Damn if that geep doesn't look like a Florida East Coast unit.

[brokemoto]

Damn if that geep doesn't look like a Florida East Coast unit.

SSW did not have that much passenger power:  The one GP-7 (the only GP-7 that it ever had), the one FP-7 and two PAs.  All of them were in Daylight colors at one point.  The PAs wound up in California as did the FP-7.  It was on its last leg when it worked the SF Peninsula commutes in the 1960s and early 1970s I rode behind the FP-7 more than a few times on those trains.  It often worked #110, which, until the mid-1960s, still carried mail and express.  It was also the "early school bus on rails" for St. Francis and Bellarmine students who had to be at school early for some extra-curricular (I went to Bellarmine; sometimes we had Water Polo practice early in the morning before classes started).  By the late 1960s, it was usually just the FP-7 and one Harriman "sub".  When you consider how bad a shape that FP-7 was in, it was a wonder that it could pull even that one car.  It spewed as much black smoke as did an ALCo when it accelerated.  There were not many ALCo s on the SF Peninsula at the time, although I did see an RSD-5 in Santa Clara Yards as a crew fired off the thing--you want to talk about ALCo s and black smoke.................................