Finding FMs in Mexico
An admirer of Fairbanks-Morse locomotives encounters them south of the border
An admirer of FairbanksMorse locomotives encounters them south of the border
THOSE OF US WHO BEGAN our rail-fanning in the 1950s experienced diesel locomotives built by four or even five builders, and naturally we would pick a favorite to root for, usually an underdog that didn’t have EMD’s market presence. Trains magazine during that time wisely refrained from any performance comparisons among builders, and this gave us the opportunity to like any locomotive whatever reason we wanted. For some reason, I was bitten by the Fairbanks-Morse bug.
This was a builder whose products included an exotic opposed-piston engine originally developed for use in submarines, a 2,000-h.p. freight locomotive built as early as 1947, and a five-axle passenger locomotive, so the firm had to be special. Although it had supplied equipment to the railroad industry since the 19th century, FM did not enter the locomotive business as a builder until 1944. FM hood units had a rugged, pleasing appearance, influenced by famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy. FM units were rare in northeast Iowa where I lived, so my first sighting of three H16-44 road-switchers on a train on the Milwaukee Road’s Mississippi River line at Dubuque, Iowa, was pure infatuation.
Around 1960 a friend of my father’s who had visited his daughter in FM’s factory town of Beloit, Wis., told him that FM was hiring people to build locomofor
tives for a railroad in Mexico.
A year or so later, Trains published in its March 1961 issue a photo of a new H16-44 destined for Mexico’s Chihuahua al Pacifico Railroad. ChP had recently completed its line from Ojinaga in the state of Chihuahua (across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Texas) through the spectacular Copper Canyon to Topolobampo on the Gulf of California in the state of Sinaloa.
An early-1960s family move to southern New Mexico gave me access to Southern Pacific FM switchers in El Paso, Texas, but the best was soon to come. In December ’63 I accompanied several family friends on a ChP journey from the city of Chihuahua through rugged mountains to Los Mochis, not far from the terminus at Topolobampo.
SOUTH TO FAIRBANKS COUNTRY
We began our journey on a December morning in Chihuahua, quite cold because of the city’s 4,800-foot elevation. Our train was two very new Fiat-built railcars. As we waited to depart, an FM switcher busied itself nearby — H12-44 No. 70, ChP’s only FM switcher and the last switcher built by FM, in 1961.
Once underway, the first several hours took us through an arid part of Chihuahua, Mexico’s largest state, before the mountains began. Numerous burros were on the track, requiring lots of horn-blowing and occasional slowing when they wouldn’t clear the way. One particularly
obstreperous burro stood staring at the oncoming train with his hind end on the track. A bump from the train gave him a message he hopefully wouldn’t forget. Perhaps he was lucky that it was lightweight Fiat railcars rather than a massive FM locomotive that taught him his lesson.
Our first meet was at La Junta, a small town with a yard where the ChP line to the large city of Ciudad Juarez (across the Rio Grande from El Paso) joined the main line. An eastbound train waited in the yard with the spectacular sight of four H16-44s on the point in the ChP colors of orange with black bottom and roof.
The clean, uncluttered lines on that string of FM hood units reminded me of a diagram used to teach perspective in drawing, where parallel lines converge neatly at some point in the distance. There are few photos of more than three H16s in multiple on the U.S. railroads, and I knew I was seeing something special.
Our next meet at the town of Terrero produced another eastbound train with four H16s, but this one had a surprise. The lead unit had a low nose — Trains never told me about this! My first reaction was to be glad that FM was offering a product with the latest, increasingly popular, carbody configuration — didn’t that indicate a future for the firm’s locomotives?
My other reaction was to realize that this thing (which in fact was the handiwork of ChP’s own shops) was ugly. It didn’t seem very functional, either — the height of the nose was such that the engineer would have to stand up to see over the short hood. I was reminded that when low-profile hood units were introduced, Trains had difficulty figuring out what to call them, sometimes using the term “chop-nose.” H16 No. 515 fit that term to a “T.”
After Terrero, the line passes through some 200 miles in rugged mountains, complete with the more than 80 tunnels and many spectacular bridges for which ChP’s Copper Canyon line is famous. Our only meet in the mountains was eastbound passenger train 7, and I could make out only a few locomotives in the darkness as we approached our destination of Los Mochis.
The Fiat cars weren’t running the day we made our return trip, so we took regular train No. 7. Power for the 12-car train was three H16s, led by low-nose 514. Soon after departing, we stopped on
a siding at San Blas and saw some nonFM locomotive variety. After a wait, Ferrocarril del Pacifico passenger train 2, El Yaqui, passed by at high speed on its journey from Nogales to Guadalajara. Its locomotives were two Alco RSD12s, led by 3-year-old No. 513, painted green with yellow accents. These were serious, purposeful units, with bold yellow chevron stripes on the ends and train numbers mounted on the hood in the style of Southern Pacific, a past owner of the Pacifico. Seeing this train rush by made me wonder, If Alcos can haul important Mexican passenger trains, why aren’t they in more demand to haul at least freight in the U.S.?
I have no memory of how the FM opposed-piston engines sounded as they climbed the mountains on our eastbound trip. I do remember that the H16s gave out large amounts of white exhaust, and on several occasions the smoke lingered in a canyon long enough to be seen after the train looped around to a higher elevation and passed close to where it had been.
The only meet on this journey was with a train of Fiat railcars, so my locomotive sighting was minimal. Hindsight tells me that somewhere along the line during our Mexican odyssey was 10-month-old H16-44 No. 604, but I wasn’t diligent about recording all engine numbers then, and certainly didn’t know that this would be the last locomotive built by Fairbanks-Morse.
SUBSEQUENT SIGHTINGS
The years after this brought more FM sightings, with an occasional single H16 seen at the joint ChP-Nacionales de Mexico yard in Juarez. Service in the Navy assigned me in 1970 to the base at Norfolk, Va., with a Norfolk & Western coal storage yard nearby. Several pairs of darkblue ex-Virginian H16s were always there, buried among the coal cars and shuffling them about. This was a different FM experience for me — rather than being the future of the railroad, the bedraggled units were its past, living out their last years.
Four years later in 1974 found me again at Los Mochis, this time to take the ChP Fiat railcars as part of a roundabout trip from Los Angeles to New Mexico. As I waited to board, I took a picture of two H16s coupled together outside the station. Once again, I was mesmerized by a low-nose unit, No. 514. However, behind these units is my “regret factor,” or opportunity cost, so familiar to railfans — the rare locomotive or unusual train that we missed when we chose to pursue the known object that was right in front of us.
My photo shows a third H16 behind the ones I photographed. It was ChP 531, a former Delaware, Lackawanna & Western unit (No. 935) that had toiled in northeastern Pennsylvania’s cement belt in its early years. I was so taken by that low-nose H16 that I missed the earlier DL&W gem with the attractive headlight casing that early FM hood units possessed, and I’m still hard on myself for missing it. My later observations during the trip somewhat made up for this, as I saw two more H16s that had been purchased secondhand from U.S. railroads: 530 and a cannibalized 533, which had been DL&W 934 and New York Central 7012, respectively. ChP had purchased six H16s of DL&W origin and two original NYC units to supplement its fleet.
The years since then have produced excellent documentation of FM’s attempts to break into the locomotive market, as well as comprehensive data on the diesels it produced. An example is Robert Aldag’s seminal article in March and April 1987 Trains, which gives an insider’s account of the mechanical shortcomings experienced by FM’s engines as locomotive prime movers. The article tarnished the FM image a bit for me, but insights like this enrich our railfan experience. No amount of new information, however, can destroy my early admiration for Fairbanks-Morse locomotives, from the days when I thought the firm’s future was as bright as the Chihuahua sky.
TIM KERWIN, 74, grew up in a small Iowa town served by four railroads. He misses the variety of that time, but recognizes that the information available to railfans today far exceeds the past. This enriches our picture of classic-era operations, but also enables greater appreciation of today’s scene. This is Tim’s first Classic Trains byline.