Santa Fe GP9 Warbonnet?

Nope.  Fantasy Island for GP7's and 9's.

A simplified version first appeared on passenger service GE U28CG's delivered in 1966.  The full warbonnet was revived in 1990 on Santa Fe's GP60M's and locomotives after that.  However, while the early GP's were given yellow warbonnets, no GP7 or 9 was give the traditional "passenger" warbonnet treatment.

Rusty

Very sad, it is such a lovely paint job but I am not into fantasy schemes so I do not feel too bad about doing a repaint into something that really plied the rails. Thanks Rusty!

I have the GP7 warbonnet and love it. Sure Santa Fe never did that paint scheme for that diesel, but Santa Fe had GP7's so they had the tools to do it, just not a reason.

They had the blue and yellow warbonnet version that most of us have seen on the Geeps and I think the red and silver looks pretty but I want my trains to represent something that actually ran.  I have a set of zebra stripe decals so I will probably just convert it to the "as delivered" scheme.

The ATSF Zebras.  An under rated scheme.

I like to come up with a seemingly probable backstory to explain away non-prototype paint schemes. If I had this engine, my backstory would be this; it came into the Cleburne, TX shop after the Santa Fe had gone to the blue and yellow freight paint scheme. The engine had been involved in a derailment and was banged up pretty bad. The shop foreman was an old timer named Burns who was close to retirement and a bit upset the brass in Chicago had dropped the war bonnet paint scheme. As his parting shot to Santa Fe management before retirement, once repairs had been completed he had the engine repainted in the classic war bonnet paint scheme. Once the engine started showing up around the system and the story got out, crews began referring  to this as the “Burns bonnet” engine. 😉

Curt