RailSmith - 74911 - Passenger Car, Smoothside, Pullman, Dining - Southern Pacific - 10204

Specific Item Information: Southern Pacific had five cars built in 1949 by Pullman-Standard, as 48 seat diners. Four of the cars were delivered for service on the San Francisco Overland, and one of the cars for the City of San Francisco (COSF).

Southern Pacific loved triple unit diners! Four ESPEE trains, the Cascade, Lark, Shasta Daylight and the Coast Daylight, each had four differently configured three car diner sets. When these cars went in the shop for service, other dining and lounge cars would be substituted from the protection pool of dining cars.

We have chosen to produce car #10204 for these reasons: 1. Delivered in Two-Tone-Gray, it was the last car of this class in this TTG scheme. 2.It was used for protection on the Cascade as well as the Lark. 3.We find this car in consists list for every train we are building at this time except the Golden State.

Thus, this one car, road number 10204 in the TTG scheme can be used on: Cascade, City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Overland. Eventually this car went to Amtrak in the Simulated Stainless Steel paint scheme. This car NEVER wore the usual yellow & gray for the COSF trains. Rather it went from TTG to Simulated Stainless Steel with red stripe.

Road Name History: The Southern Pacific Transportation Company (reporting mark SP), earlier Southern Pacific Railroad and Southern Pacific Company, and usually called the Southern Pacific or (from the railroad's initials) Espee, was an American Class I railroad. It was absorbed in 1988 by the company that controlled the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad and eight years later became part of the Union Pacific Railroad.

The railroad was founded as a land holding company in 1865, later acquiring the Central Pacific Railroad by lease. By 1900 the Southern Pacific Company was a major railroad system incorporating many smaller companies, such as the Texas and New Orleans Railroad and Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad. It extended from New Orleans through Texas to El Paso, across New Mexico and through Tucson, to Los Angeles, through most of California, including San Francisco and Sacramento. Central Pacific lines extended east across Nevada to Ogden, Utah, and reached north through Oregon to Portland. Other subsidiaries eventually included the St. Louis Southwestern Railway (Cotton Belt), the Northwestern Pacific Railroad at 328 miles (528 km), the 1,331 miles (2,142 km) Southern Pacific Railroad of Mexico, and a variety of 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge routes.

In 1929 SP/T&NO operated 13848 route-miles not including Cotton Belt, whose purchase of the Golden State Route circa 1980 nearly doubled its size to 3,085 miles (4,965 km), bringing total SP/SSW mileage to around 13,508 miles (21,739 km).

By the 1980s route mileage had dropped to 10,423 miles (16,774 km), mainly due to the pruning of branch lines. In 1988 the Southern Pacific was taken over by D&RGW parent Rio Grande Industries. The combined railroad kept the Southern Pacific name due to its brand recognition in the railroad industry and with customers of both constituent railroads. Along with the addition of the SPCSL Corporation route from Chicago to St. Louis, the total length of the D&RGW/SP/SSW system was 15,959 miles (25,684 km).

By 1996 years of financial problems had dropped SP's mileage to 13,715 miles (22,072 km), and it was taken over by the Union Pacific Railroad.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: RailSmith is a brand launched by Lowell Smith in 2019. Lowell acquired the toolings from Walthers.

With each release, RailSmith will bring passenger cars from across the spectrum of North America’s railroads, with the goal of building entire trains over a period-of-time. It is our plan to release cars that might be for a specific train, but you can use these cars as you see fit, as did the railroads.

Production plans are grand, but we believe they are also achievable. We do not have the capabilities to release an entire train at once, but being able to focus on one release (two-or-three cars at a time), we can build a train over time.