Shooting
Eagles
Far from the main line, Arkansas photographers sought to document
every one of Missouri Pacific’s cab-unit passenger diesels
By Louis A. Marre • Photos by the author
M
PACIFIC not only called
its premier trains “Eagles,”
but to emphasize the brand,
also spread a heraldic eagle
with a wingspan of more than 8 feet
across the noses of its passenger diesels. Freight units, and Geeps purchased with steam generators for dual
service, did not rate the “full eagle
treatment”—it was reserved for the fast
runners exclusively.
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ISSOURI
All told, 23 EMD E-unit and 36 Alco
PA locomotives wore the stainless-steel
eagle, and the first systematic project I
undertook as a railroad photographer
was to capture every one of these
winged creatures on film. In the time
frame under discussion, 1955-60, I was
in high school in Fort Smith, Ark., and
then away at college, far off-line in Indiana. The constraint in the first instance was a lack of transportation (no
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car) and in the second, mere opportunity (distance).
The other limiting factor was the
fact that my hometown of Fort Smith
was, to put it politely, not on a big eagle
flight path, as MoPac ran just one pair
of trains, nameless Nos. 125-126, into
town. Once called the Sunflower, the
train by then was just a four-car, allstops maid-of-all-work that required
141⁄2 hours of methodical progress to go
Pure and vintage Missouri Pacific, train No. 125 cruises majestically over
Frog Bayou between Alma and Van Buren, Ark. (top left), not far from our
hometown of Fort Smith, on September 13, 1958, with four heavyweight
blue-and-gray cars and an attractive Alco PA up front, its big eagle gleambetween Kansas City and Little Rock.
This was a trek of some 525 miles,
most if not all of it on jointed rail in
block-signal, train-order territory.
Fortunately for my project, the
trains called at MoPac’s riverside depot
in daylight in both directions (at least
in summer): 12:42 p.m. westbound and
6:20 p.m. eastbound. The noontime
train was in good light during the winter months, and the evening train was
the target of choice during summer.
One bit of good luck was tied to
Missouri Pacific’s locomotive assignment policies of the period. Engines
were not regularly assigned to any one
train; rather, they were maintained in a
pool in ever-changing patterns of use.
Thus we in Fort Smith had a fair shot
at seeing anything on the passengerdiesel roster—with one troublesome exception—if we just kept going down to
the depot often enough.
Noting this rotation of power, we
(almost every other railroad fan in
town shared in this project at one point
or another) determined to photograph
ing in the sun. On a gray March 27, 1960, E8 7020 exits the Arkansas
River bridge with train 125 (above). This was the last day of service for
the Kansas City-Fort Smith-Little Rock run, and by the end of the decade,
the bridge also would be gone, a victim of a river navigation project.
every one of the aforementioned 59
units. We were all aware that the single
exception would be the 7100, a unique
unit with an E6A carbody but only one
1000 h.p. engine inside instead of the
normal two. This was Electro-Motive
Division’s AA model (AA6 to the MoPac), a counterpart to Rock Island’s two
AB6’s, which had the same machinery
as a standard E6 but lacked conventional cabs and therefore the long
snouts of the early E-unit carbodies.
The 7100 was known to be permanently assigned to the little Delta Eagle
over on the other side of Arkansas, and
not likely, by virtue of that duty and its
meager horsepower, ever to appear on
Nos. 125-126. Apart from this oddity,
all the other eagle-bedecked passenger
units were fair game and would appear
in front of a camera in Fort Smith
sooner or later.
I kept a list. One by one, I would
check off the numbers as unit after unit
was committed to film. To do this, I
used a truly eclectic variety of cameras:
secondhand postcard-size Kodaks; a
borrowed 4x5 Graflex; two Kodak 616
Monitor folding cameras; and a twinlens reflex copied by Ansco from expired Rolleiflex patents.
Under the limitations of scrounging
rides to the depot, finding time in a
normal high-school schedule, waiting
for the rain to stop, and a thousand
other impediments, I and my friends
achieved our aim in about two years.
Our work was just in time, too, as Missouri Pacific pulled the plug on our little train at the spring timetable change
in 1960. Thus did the window of opportunity close to just a crack—St.
Louis, Kansas City, or Little Rock became the preferred venues for eaglehunting, and we could not go there on
just any old afternoon.
An aside about a neighbor, please:
Observant readers will note, in the
background of a couple of these photos
at MoPac’s depot, Pullman-green passenger equipment of our town’s other
passenger railroad, the St. Louis-San
Francisco. “The Frisco’s” station and division office building stood directly op-
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Rarest of the eagle E units were the four “slant-nosed” models—two E3A’s
and two E6A’s purchased, along with lightweight trainsets, by the MoPac
for what became its trademark Eagle service. Representing this 1940 generation is E6A 7003, built (as part of two E6A-B sets) in October 1941, for
the St. Louis-Denver Colorado Eagle. Long since removed from that premier
train for more mundane duties, 7003 is backing No. 126 off the wye at the
posite Missouri Pacific’s more modest
structure. In this period, Fort Smith
also saw just one Frisco train each way
a day, originating in Paris, Texas, and
joining the Lawton, Okla.-St. Louis Meteor at Monett, Mo., to the west of
Springfield. Service south to Paris terminated during the course of our Missouri Pacific eagle-hunting activities,
but the Fort Smith-Monett segment
survived. We dubbed it “the Meteorite.”
Standing on the outbound leg of the wye, train
125 is still loading mail and express on a June
1957 day. In charge is one of Missouri Pacific’s
14 E7A’s, the most numerous of its postwar
EMD E unit models, acquired gradually during
1945-48. The portholed side panels on the E7’s
(including the 8 E7B’s) are a MoPac hallmark, a
signature item in Raymond Loewy’s design of
the road’s first streamliner, the 1940 Eagle (renamed Missouri River Eagle in 1941) that
linked St. Louis, Kansas City, and Omaha, and
its two E3A’s, 7000 and 7001. MoPac, and affiliate Texas & Pacific, continued to special-order
portholes on their E7’s, eschewing EMD’s standard rectangular windows. When EMD introduced the successor E8, it adopted portholes as
standard!
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CLASSIC TRAINS | WINTER 2004
Fort Smith stop in August ’58. Trains arrived in Fort Smith over a 4-mile
branch from the main line at Greenwood Junction, Okla., crossed the Arkansas River on a bridge, and wyed into the station so as to head out over
the same bridge and retrace their route to the junction. This branch had an
early CTC installation so the swing into Fort Smith was not as time-consuming as it would have been if all the switches had to be thrown by hand.
At Monett, the Fort Smith-St. Louis
sleeping car was tacked onto the rear of
the eastbound Meteor, and its counterpart car was removed from the westbound Meteor for the return to Fort
Smith. The standard Meteorite consist
was four cars: a green heavyweight express car, a baggage-RPO combination,
a coach, and a River-series 14-4 sleeper.
Frisco’s top passenger power, 23 E
units, had their own cachet by virtue of
being painted red and named after famous horses, but we couldn’t shoot the
horses the way we shot the eagles. As a
rule, the red-and-gold horses would
stray only occasionally from Frisco’s
fast tracks—the St. Louis-Oklahoma
City-Lawton, St. Louis-Memphis, and
Kansas City-Memphis-Birmingham main
lines—and the Fort Smith train usually
had one or two of Frisco’s dozen blackand-yellow, dual-purpose FP7’s, or on
Fine feathers
C
OMPLIMENTS ARE DUE the Missouri Pacific Railroad, post facto,
for sticking with its glorious aluminum eagle decoration on
diesel noses after the first two Eagle streamliners of the early 1940’s.
A key element in designer Raymond Loewy’s “look” for the original
1940 trainsets, the metal eagle adorned not only the noses of their
E3’s, 7000 and 7001, but also the rounded rear end of the parlor-observation cars, 750 and 751. An important detail to note is that the
E3’s, and MoPac’s two E6A’s on the 1942 Colorado Eagle, lacked
nose doors, so those units’ eagles were one-piece decorations. The
later E7’s, E8’s, and Alco PA’s all had nose doors, requiring the eagle
be a three-piece item.
Also of note is what these metal eagles “carried on their breast,”
if you will: the well-known circular Missouri Pacific Lines “buzzsaw”
logo. This was not quite always the case, for the eagles on Texas & Pacific’s 10 E7A’s and 8 E8A’s wore
T&P’s diamond emblem. Moreover, soon after the Colorado
Eagle hit the road, the eagles on
the noses of E6A’s 7002 and
7003 carried a buzzsaw with the
train name. The two participating
railroads’ names were spelled
out below the wings: Missouri Pacific on the engineer’s side of the
nose, Rio Grande on the fireman’s side. This changed after
the war when MP got more E
units and began to take advanRICK CHURCH
Having just completed its backup move down the cross leg of the wye, E7
7011 is pulling forward on the outbound portion and will make its station
stop in about two car-lengths. When it does, a mountain of mail waits to
be loaded. This is the shortest regular consist: one RPO-express car, one
combination baggage-coach, and one coach. When MoPac’s small fleet of
R O B E RT M I L N E R
The “Eaglet” met the big bird at Union, Nebr. (above); the “buzzsaw” on
the Colorado Eagle’s E6’s nose decorations (left) carried the train name.
tage of the diesel’s flexibility by assigning various units to the train,
and the E6’s nose eagles then got the standard “Missouri Pacific
Lines” buzzsaw.
Remarkably, several eagles, on both E’s and PA’s, survived the repainting of their units into the 1960’s “Downing Jenks era” solid blue,
and a few eagles, including on E6A No. 11 and at least one PA, still
adorned noses of units after they were given new two-digit identifications (44-79 for the Alcos) in the 1962 system renumbering program.
Finally, there was one more MoPac passenger conveyance wearing
eagles: American Car & Foundry streamlined motor car 670 (above).
Affectionately dubbed the “Eaglet” and also styled, inside and out, by
Loewy, this double-ended car—yes, it sported an eagle on each end—
was built in March 1942 to serve as the Union-Lincoln, Nebr., branchline connection to the mainline streamliner. Patterned after 1940 cars
for the New York, Susquehanna & Western, MoPac 670 moved south
in the mid-’50’s to replace AA 7100 on the old Delta Eagle run, and
was not scrapped until 1960.—J. David Ingles
combines ran low, a full baggage car and two coaches made up the “big”
four-car set. The bridge visible is a highway crossing of the Arkansas River.
MoPac’s bridge, once a combination rail-and-highway bridge before the
pictured road bridge was built, is parallel to it at the point where the wye
track 7011 is entering meets its other leg—about 100 yards to the left.
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I did not fully appreciate how fortunate I was to undertake my “shoot ’em
all” project on the Missouri Pacific until much later. Where else would
Alco’s handsome PA’s outnumber EMD’s more common E’s in that part of
the world? Certainly not on the Frisco—it had no Alco passenger units.
The Missouri-Kansas-Texas, over in Oklahoma, had them aplenty, but by
The appearance in Fort Smith of a PA that we’d not already photographed moved us to heroic measures, even if conditions were
not quite ideal for photography. This portrait of No. 8005 required the services of a No. 5 Sylvania flashbulb (about the size
of a 150-watt incandescent) and a tripod. And as a bonus, we’ve
also caught the engineer ascending to his throne to guide train
126 out of town. It was early March 1957, pitch dark, and raining—but we could mark one more unit off the list.
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CLASSIC TRAINS | WINTER 2004
the time I undertook my MoPac project, most of the Katy PA’s were rusting hulks in the weeds at the Parsons (Kans.) shop. In soft evening light,
the sight of that famous nose with the stainless-steel eagle emblazoned
upon it was truly impressive. Train 126 is under the guidance of PA1 8009
in mid-July 1957, and I’ve checked one more number off the “wanted list.”
The noontime call of No. 125 was the only one in daylight in midwinter, and on
Christmas Day 1956, it has drawn one of the final-order PA’s. MoPac bought the
18 units of this 1952 group solely because they could be delivered quickly, whereas EMD was still working about a year behind orders. Further, MP wanted large
steam-generator capacity, because it still operated many steam-ejector air-conditioning systems on older rolling stock and needed as much steam in midsummer
as it did in midwinter . . . and Alco provided truly heroic boiler capacities in its
last incarnation of the PA model. These are the units persistently called “PA3’s” by
some, though they are in fact still DL-304 specification and thus model PA2, despite the simplified grille and trim package that might suggest a change of model.
Inside, all is still as it was: 2250 h.p. from a 16-244 prime mover. All this aside,
8021 was a true Christmas present—another unit off the “wanted” list.
Raising dust and commotion through the stockyards at West Fort Smith,
Okla., MoPac PA 8025—seventh of the final order of 18—and the four-car
consist of No. 125 are smoking along over the CTC-protected 4-mile
occasion an E unit and an FP7.
(There was one period of exception,
but by then I was up north at college.
For a short time into fall 1960, Frisco
assigned two E7’s to the Fort SmithMonett and Monett-Wichita trains, and
after the latter was discontinued, the
Fort Smith train got steam-generatorequipped GP7’s, which were, of course,
black. When the train began running
through Monett and on to Springfield,
the FP7’s returned.)
It is hardly necessary to belabor the
point that not only are the MoPac
trains and locomotives with the big eagles long gone, but so is the MoPac
Fort Smith depot, the Arkansas River
bridge and branch line by which the
trains reached it, and of course, the
Missouri Pacific Railroad itself.
All are one with the snows of yesteryear. y
branch between the Arkansas River and Greenwood Junction on a brisk
March noontime in 1960, just a few days before the end of the service.
The river bridge itself is visible above the stockpens at the left.
GORDON B. MOTT
The penultimate E unit on Missouri Pacific’s roster drew the melancholy assignment of powering
the final run of train 125 from Little Rock to Kansas City. A retired engineer has come down to
reminisce with the crew before MoPac’s Fort Smith depot falls silent forever. It is a gloomy March
27, 1960, and no such eagle-shooting project will be undertaken by anyone in Fort Smith again.
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