Southern Pacific introduced piggyback service, highway trailers moving on railroad cars, in 1953. As 1953 is my modeling year, I have held off from modeling what would be the earliest days of this service (later, of course, to grow to major proportions on SP and all railroads). But SP’s introductory TOFC route (TOFC =Trailer on Flat Car) was in fact the Coast Route, a very small segment of which is depicted on my layout. So I do have the era and location to model a little bit of SP piggyback.
I would like to describe both history and modeling of the early SP piggyback service, and I expect it will require several posts in a series, which is why this one is called Part 1. A strength of the SP concept for TOFC service was that they already had a healthy business in their subsidiary, Pacific Motor Trucking or PMT, which is where I will start.
[I have written before about PMT, in a three-part series in the SP Historical & Technical Society magazine Trainline, in the issues for Spring and Summer, 1995, and Winter 1996, which were issues 43, 44, and 46, so will only summarize here.]
SP began to compete in the trucking business in the Los Angeles area in the 1920s, and one of the original SP subsidiaries was the Pacific Electric Motor Trucking Company. At first, PEMT hired local draymen for the trucking, with PE providing freight houses and rail service across the LA basin, then local draymen at destination providing delivery. At that point, PEMT was acting like an express company, providing no transportation itself, but organizing and contracting for it, and providing a single bill to customers.
Once they began to offer out-of-town rail service, for example to Santa Barbara via SP, the business took off, and was soon renamed PMT in February 1930. They quickly became truck operators themselves, with original trucks and equipment painted the dark red familiar on Pacific Electric equipment. Again, this was nothing like piggyback, just package service by truck, to and from freight houses (but now in PMT equipment), and rail service using baggage cars. This soon expanded to a Los-Angeles–-San Francisco route.
As the service grew, SP decided to operate special trains and use dedicated box cars, which initially were Dark Olive Green but soon acquired the famous pre-war “Overnight” scheme of an all-black car with orange lettering and body stripe. This was discontinued as a non-essential service during World War II, but revived as soon as the war ended, still with all-black box cars but now with an even more famous paint scheme. (photo courtesy Bruce Petty)
What made this go was PMT, still providing pick-up of packages and taking them to an SP freight house, just as in the earliest days, then to be loaded into Overnight cars, and at the other end, delivering those packages to the recipient from a freight house. In other words, it was the same door-to-door service originally conceived. It remained primarily an LA–San Francisco business, with guaranteed next-day (“overnight”) service.
Naturally PMT equipment was decorated to show the SP connection, and in the 1930s became Daylight Red and Orange, as in the GMC box truck shown below, which would have been used for in-town pickup and delivery (SP photo, courtesy Paul Koehler). In addition, PMT owned flat-bed trucks, stake trucks, tank trucks, and a wide variety of other truck equipment, used for inter-city trucking as well as the Overnight door-to-door operation. There were lots of equipment photos in my Trainline articles.
The inter-city work was mostly done with semi-trailers of conventional design, most of them with doors on the right or curb side for in-town delivery, along with end doors for freight platforms. The photo below is a 1940s publicity photo to emphasize the rail connection, shown here as a box car at a freight platform (SP photo, courtesy Steve Peery). The tractor here is a GMC, typical of SP’s long closeness with Chevrolet and GMC motor vehicles, pulling a 22-foot trailer.
Although most PMT tractors were conventional ones like that shown above, PMT did operate a fair number of cab-over tractors. Often they were Internationals, as in the photo below, which shows a 1946 Model D-500 tractor at Los Angeles (SP photo). At right is a dolly which will enable a second trailer to be attached, forming what was known as a “Western double.” The curb-side door is evident.
For a color view of these “Daylight” scheme trailers, the view below near 5th and King streets in San Francisco should suffice. This is an Alden Armstrong photo of Train 132 departing for Los Gatos; power is Class P-7 Pacific no. 2476. The side door PMT trailer is in the freight shed area, with SP’s Grocer’s Terminal building in the distance.
This gives the PMT background. I will continue in following posts with a description of the beginnings of the SP and PMT piggyback story, and of course modeling,
Tony Thompson
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