Santa Fe's FT Diesels (1st Paint Scheme) in Victorville, and Redesigning the Staging Yards

This time we'll take at look at Santa Fe's EMD FT freight diesels in their original paint scheme as they came through Victorville, and then we'll look at progress in redesigning the staging yards on the lower deck.

The Santa Fe bought 80 four-unit FT diesel sets between Dec. 1940 and Aug. 1945 to help with the war effort, numbered 100 to 179.  Here's a famous publicity photo they shot at Sullivan's Curve in Cajon Pass:

 

Until mid-1945 (when WW2 ended), all the units were in blue and yellow with a thin red stripe separating those colors for the full length of the carbodies, as seen here:

 

They later had several other paint schemes, but we will only cover the full red stripe scheme this time.  From mid-1945 until about mid-1948, they gradually repainted all of their freight FTs so that the red stripe was only on the cab.  So, during my time period starting in 1946, there were many of these with full red stripes in 1946, fewer in 1947, and not many left in 1948.

Here's a 1942 photo showing a set of FTs entering Victorville eastbound through the Upper Narrows by the Rainbow Bridge:

 

Here's a beautiful postwar shot by Chard Walker as a set of FTs leaves Victorville westbound through the Upper Narrows, headed for Cajon Pass (these units may have only partial red stripes, it's hard to tell):

During WW2 these FTs were all configured as ABBB sets, to settle a union dispute about having a crew in the trailing cab of an ABBA set.  Here's one of these sets, #129, crossing the desert during the war:

 

But in Sep. 1944 it was agreed that no crews were needed in the trailing cabs, and the Santa Fe began reconfiguring almost all their FTs (except #100-104) into ABBA sets.  This was completed by Sep. 1945, just before my time period begins.

Here's a Jan. 1945 photo of FT set #107 arriving at Summit from Victorville, still in its ABBB configuration, as shot by Fletcher Swan:

A couple of other notes: During the summer of 1946, eleven of the FT sets were converted to passenger service and Warbonnet paint, and we'll cover those another time.  And in the spring of 1947, some of the freight FT sets were broken into smaller sets, such as ABB, ABA, and A, with new numbers of 180-185.

Years ago Stewart made all of the Santa Fe FT paint schemes in HO scale, and I have at least two ABBA sets with the full red stripe for use in 1946-1948, as seen here:

Now let's get back to progress on the layout, which happened on the drawing board again. Taking Tim Fisher's advice to move as many turnouts as possible close to the aisles so they can be thrown manually, I erased all the turnout locations and most of the tracks from the Version 1 track plans you saw last time.  

I redrew the whole thing in pencil again, using #6 turnouts everywhere except on the mainline crossovers, which are still #8.  Here is the new Version 2.1 of the main peninsula staging area:

The double-track mainline still follows the edge of the benchwork around, and inside of that is the 10-track double-ended staging yard.  The rest of the yards here are stub-ended.  Three of the legs will have to be moved a little, and I'll add a small triangle of benchwork beside the post, for the lead into the small yard there.

Here is Version 2 of the turntable area trackage (I moved the turntable a bit to the left, to center it between the joists):

 

Last time I didn't show you the drawing of the tracks in the helix room (staging room), but here it is (the roadbed for all these tracks was laid down many months ago):

A lot of this past week was spent drawing various versions of a straight-line track schematic, so that I can study the flow of trains through staging.  I also gave names to the various yards (A Yard, B Yard, etc.) and numbered the tracks in each yard from the closest to the mainline (track A1) to the farthest away (track A10).

This latest schematic is laid out to scale along the mainlines and looks like this:

Note the A yard with the 10 double-ended tracks for trains, and the adjacent B Yard with about 10 stub-ended tracks for storing trains.  The C Yard has short stub tracks and is probably for loco storage, like the turntable area.  The D and E Yards are in the helix room.  The dashed line for the return loop track looks long in this schematic, but it's actually only a few feet long.

I used a string to measure the length of each staging track, and I converted the lengths to actual feet.  Here's a table of the results:

Today I got lots of suggestions from Tim Fisher on how to further improve the track plan, so I'll be studying and implementing these changes during the next week.