@WesternPacific2217 posted:My layout is western roads and I live in NorCal and grew up in Palo Alto, CA, the home of Stanford University. A quick comment about Silicon Valley: It seems everybody thinks San Jose is the original Silicon Valley is sort of incorrect. The roots are in Palo Alto and Santa Clara. Palo Alto - Fairchild, Hewlett Packard, Varian. Santa Clara, Intel, AMD and many more semiconductor developers .
These cities were serviced by Southern Pacific (SP) Peninsula Commuter Service (San Francisco to San Jose) and then Caltrain began taking over the service in 1980. With all that said, while I was in Junior high school and then high school in Palo Alto, I remember clearly the FM Train Master H24-66's that SP used to pull the commuters trains. They were perfect for commuter service as they had 2400HP and accelerated and stopped very quickly, just what ya want for commuter trains. SP also used EMD GP9's and SDP45 on the peninsula commuter trains, but they were no match for the Train Master acceleration and top speed.
That being the case, I already have the Lionel Legacy SP FM Train Master H24-66 #4809 that I got from a fellow OGR member. I was watching another SP FM Train Master H24-66 on eBay for about 3 months, and it never sold, so I made an reasonable and fair offer to the seller and they accepted. So now I have a second Lionel Legacy SP FM H24-66 Train Master #4803.It was used, but it looks and runs brand new! Here's some photos and a video.
Southern Pacific FM Train Masters #4809 and #4803 new to the stable lash up pulling some freight.
Terrific, Scott. They look and run great together!
