RailSmith - 302002 - Passenger Car, Lightweight, Observation, Blunt-Ended - Southern Pacific - 9041

Specific Item Information: Presenting the SP observation #9041 in yellow & gray for the City of Los Angeles!

Southern Pacific took five of their Plan 4140 sleepers and converted them to blunt-end cars to give the City of San Francisco a ‘finished end look’ for that train. Unlike the four Cascade and Golden State Obs cars that were built at Pullman, the five COSF cars were rebuilt in the SP shops. The end look all being the same.

This car #9041, was one of those five cars that served most of its life on the COSF so we have listed it also under that train. While the 9041 was used mostly on the COSF, this particular car actually was run by the UP on the City of Los Angeles during 1960 & 1961. According to the SPHTS, it was thought that UP sent 6-6-4 sleepers to the SP for Overland Route service in exchange for the use of blunt-end 10/6 cars. We have relied on the Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society for all of our information. Actual photo here of 9041 on the City of Los Angeles is by Kyle Brewster.

This car has no drumhead in place as one was not used for this service on the COLA. With this in mind, you could use this observation on any UP train, in your railroad world.

RailSmith Blunt End Observation features: accurate newly tooled end detail including operating rear & interior lights, photo etched door safety bar, period and car accurate drumhead (not lit), as well as Micro-Trains True Scale Coupler on the rear of the car.

Model Information: RailSmith released sets of mixed body styles in the Pullman lightweight series starting in 2019.

Road Name History: The Southern Pacific Transportation Company (reporting mark SP), earlier Southern Pacific Railroad and Southern Pacific Company, and usually called the Southern Pacific or (from the railroad's initials) Espee, was an American Class I railroad. It was absorbed in 1988 by the company that controlled the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad and eight years later became part of the Union Pacific Railroad.

The railroad was founded as a land holding company in 1865, later acquiring the Central Pacific Railroad by lease. By 1900 the Southern Pacific Company was a major railroad system incorporating many smaller companies, such as the Texas and New Orleans Railroad and Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad. It extended from New Orleans through Texas to El Paso, across New Mexico and through Tucson, to Los Angeles, through most of California, including San Francisco and Sacramento. Central Pacific lines extended east across Nevada to Ogden, Utah, and reached north through Oregon to Portland. Other subsidiaries eventually included the St. Louis Southwestern Railway (Cotton Belt), the Northwestern Pacific Railroad at 328 miles (528 km), the 1,331 miles (2,142 km) Southern Pacific Railroad of Mexico, and a variety of 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge routes.

In 1929 SP/T&NO operated 13848 route-miles not including Cotton Belt, whose purchase of the Golden State Route circa 1980 nearly doubled its size to 3,085 miles (4,965 km), bringing total SP/SSW mileage to around 13,508 miles (21,739 km).

By the 1980s route mileage had dropped to 10,423 miles (16,774 km), mainly due to the pruning of branch lines. In 1988 the Southern Pacific was taken over by D&RGW parent Rio Grande Industries. The combined railroad kept the Southern Pacific name due to its brand recognition in the railroad industry and with customers of both constituent railroads. Along with the addition of the SPCSL Corporation route from Chicago to St. Louis, the total length of the D&RGW/SP/SSW system was 15,959 miles (25,684 km).

By 1996 years of financial problems had dropped SP's mileage to 13,715 miles (22,072 km), and it was taken over by the Union Pacific Railroad.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: RailSmith is a brand launched by Lowell Smith in 2019. Lowell acquired the toolings from Walthers.

With each release, RailSmith will bring passenger cars from across the spectrum of North America’s railroads, with the goal of building entire trains over a period-of-time. It is our plan to release cars that might be for a specific train, but you can use these cars as you see fit, as did the railroads.

Production plans are grand, but we believe they are also achievable. We do not have the capabilities to release an entire train at once, but being able to focus on one release (two-or-three cars at a time), we can build a train over time.