General Motors Daylight Locomotive Card

For many years, General Motors issued a series of 7.5″x3.3″ cards for each of the locomotives it built for the various railroads. This card is for E-7 locomotives built for the Shasta Daylight.

Click image to download a PDF of this card.

The back of the card provides specifications for the “locomotive,” which “consists of two lead and one booster units.” Apparently, even after World War II, the railroads worried that treating a three-unit locomotive as three different locomotives would lead unions to demand that separate crews be hired to run each of the units. Unlike pre-war General Motors Diesels, however, these locomotives were not semi-permenently coupled and could easily be separated into different units.

Click image to download a PDF of this postcard, which was previously shown here.

The paint scheme shown in the General Motors card differs from the scheme used in Southern Pacific publicity photos. On the GM card, the words “Southern Pacific” appear on the upper orange stripe, a Shasta Daylight logo appears on the lower stripe, and a Shasta Daylight emblem appears on the nose. But I suspect the locomotives were actually delivered as shown in the SP photos, where “Southern Pacific” appears on the lower orange stripe and a Southern Pacific emblem appears on the nose. It made sense for SP to not mark a locomotive for a specific train so it could use it for other trains.


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