Fred Harvey issued lots of postcards showing Santa Fe trains crossing the country. We’ve seen many in the past; here are a few more presented in approximately east-to-west order. All of these are Phostint cards printed for Fred Harvey by the Detroit Publishing Company between about 1911 and 1924, when Detroit went out of business.
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Here’s a train, possibly the California Limited, crossing the Rio Grande River about 10 miles west of Albuquerque. This card is postmarked 1921.
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This card shows a 4-6-2 locomotive hauling a nine-car California Limited across Canyon Diablo, which is about 35 miles east of Flagstaff. This Phostint postcard is postmarked 1923.
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This card appears to be nearly identical to one we’ve seen before except this one has the California Limited whereas the other one had a streamliner on it. A close look convinces me that the colorist merely painted the streamliner over the heavyweight train, with the baggage car becoming the second Diesel unit and the rest of the heavyweight cars crudely converted to a greyish stainless steel appearance. This card isn’t postmarked.
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This card and the next two show trains crossing Cajon Pass in California. Here is possibly the California Limited crossing the summit. We’ve seen postcards from Cajon Pass before but mostly from the streamliner era. Note that the second card in the previous post is the same as the first except, like the Johnson’s Canyon card above, the colorist painted a Diesel streamliner over the steam-powered heavyweight train.
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The train in this photo is ascending the pass from the west side, so someone on a westbound train would see this view in the other direction. If it were any later, the locomotives would be larger.
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This shows a westbound train, possibly the California Limited, reaching the bottom of the grade from Cajon Pass. This Phostint card was mailed from Springfield Massachusetts to Pittsfield Massachusetts in 1948. There were no Fred Harvey facilities in Massachusetts, so this card must have been something the sender had collected many years before.
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We’ve seen this image on a postcard before but this one is colored differently. The photo shows an early version of the California Limited, with fewer cars than in later years, and is probably from a circa 1899 photograph by William Henry Jackson.
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Finally, a train trip to Southern California wouldn’t be complete unless it passed through an orange grove. The 4-6-2 locomotive in the picture was built by Baldwin in 1910 and this card was probably issued soon after that.