I recently acquired this circa 1949-50 photo on eBay -- as a poor quality B&W 35mm slide -- and after considerable clean-up effort, here is the rather interesting result. Photographed from Chicago's Roosevelt Road viaduct, looking south, Burlington train
No. 10, the overnight Denver Zephyr, is approaching Union Station behind a back-to-back set of E5 A-units. Due to arrive at 8:35 a.m., this day's train has the usual articulated consist amplified with three conventional pre-war lightweight cars --
a dining car ('Silver Pheasant' or 'Silver Spoon,' as 'Silver Inn' had already been destroyed in the April 1946 Naperville collision) and two chair cars -- inserted immediately behind the units with the diner's kitchen up against the nose of the trailing unit.
A variety of heavyweight passenger cars is visible in the 14th Street coachyard to the right of the train. And a departing heavyweight train can be seen in the distance on the track adjacent to the
DZ, likely a Q train also, and if No. 10 is on time it must by a suburban dinky, as no intercity trains were scheduled out before the
Morning Zephyr's 8:45 a.m. departure.
There is considerably more of interest on the left side of the scene, where the big Pennsy coachyard was located. In the left foreground is one of the rather ungainly streamlined T-1 4-4-4-4 duplex locomotives turned out for the Pennsy by Baldwin in 1945-46.
It has undoubtedly brought a passenger train in from Fort Wayne, Ind., and is now backing from the depot to the railroad's locomotive servicing facilities. Back in the coachyard behind the T-1, directly below the counterweights of the Chicago River bascule
bridge, sits a pair of Baldwin DR-6-4-2000 sharknose passenger units delivered to the Pennsy in 1948. That they are coupled to a train may indicate that they have previously backed that train from the depot to the coachyard rather than having
it pulled by one of the little SW1s the railroad regularly used as depot switchers, with the road diesels cut off and backed out separately, as the T-1 is doing. An EMD switcher is visible farther over in the coachyard, behind the T-1. And to the right of
the duplex is another Pennsy passenger train waiting to be shoved, round-end observation car first, into the depot in preparation for an eastbound departure. I don't have ready access to Pennsy timetables of the era, so I can't even hazard a guess as to what
the various trains might be. But they sure add a lot of interest to an otherwise fairly common scene of the
DZ arriving from Denver.
Hol