This card shows demonstrator #291, which General Motors built as a demonstrator for F3 (but really the F2) in July, 1945. The F3 was going to be 150 hp more powerful than an FT, but in 1945 GM realized the generator it needed wasn’t ready for mass production. So it built F locomotives ready for the improved generator but using the old one and called them F2s.

Click image to download a 715-KB PDF of this card.

Photographs of the four demonstrator units show that they were painted in two shades of bright blue, but this card makes them look two-tone gray. GM sent this demonstrator around the country, leading nine railroads to order more than 100 F2s.

In February 1946, during one of the demonstration trips, the four-unit set suffered a head-on collision with a steam locomotive. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. One of the A units was totaled. GM sold the other A unit and a B unit that had been rebuilt into an A to the Toledo, Peoria & Western Railroad. The other B unit was sold to the Monon.

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From the late 1930s through at least the 1950s, General Motors probably made a card like this for every class of locomotives and railroad that bought that class. The fronts of the cards show the colorful paint schemes developed by GM styling while the backs provided the technical specifications of each locomotive.

The cards are based on paintings by GM stylists who actually designed the paint schemes for each railroad. In the late 1930s, Leland Knickerbocker famously designed the Santa Fe warbonnet scheme used on the Super Chief and other passenger locomotives. Knickerbocker died in 1939, and in 1945 when this card was printed most of the styling and paintings were done by Harry Bockewicz and Ben Dedek. The signature on this card’s painting has been cropped off, but it looks like the work of Ben Dedek to me.

Note: This post has been updated to cover the transition from FT to F2 to F3 locomotives.