Item #7519
14"x17" original painting, mixed media, matted and framed. Signed lower left. 1989. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe reached from Los Angeles to Chicago in the course of its many years of southwestern operations. The railroad had to contend with fast, cross-country running in the prairie states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, plus the rolling desert country and rugged mountain peaks of Arizona, New Mexico, and California and the rugged mountain peaks of those same states. The Santa Fe purchased an engine in 1944 that pretty much fit the bill for the southwest, crossing in the form of the 5011 class 2-10-4 "Texas" type. They were about as big as a steam locomotive could get on ten driving wheels--tipping the scales at two hundred and seventy tons (engine only)! Their 74-inch tall drive wheels were the biggest ever applied to this type of locomotive.
With 310 pounds per square inch of boiler steam pressure, the Santa Fe's "Texans" used their 5600 horsepower effectively on high-speed freight trains. They were products of the class of '44 from the Baldwin Locomotive Works and were unsurpassed in overall dimensions for the most part. The imagery has the Number 5021 in its last year of operation, leading its successor, a four unit diesel locomotive, out of Belin, New Mexico in 1957 with an endless string of perishables headed East from California. Interestingly, the diesels were also built in 1944, but they were gone in 1962.
Number 5021 lives on, stored for posterity at the California Railroad museum in Sacramento.
