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In their day, the FTs were a mighty advancement in the state of the locomotive art. Today we'd regard them as primitive, and from where we sit now, we'd be right. But we wouldn't have called them primitive in the years just before and during World War II. Then, they were the newest and fanciest kids on the block. The Model F changed the course of railroading for the better and for all time. Together, the Santa Fe and its first freight diesel-electrics introduced an operational renaissance the railroad industry had long needed. They did so in remarkably difficult times. The renaissance might not have happened had the times not been so strenuous. It could have happened more rapidly, and doubtless would have, had the nation not been at war.
Here, we'll get to know the designer and manufacturer of Santa Fe's FTs, the outfit we've known down through time as the Electro-Motive Corporation, or the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors, or just plain Electro-Motive, or EMC, or most often EMD. The company is no longer a member of the General Motors family; today it's called Electro-Motive Diesel, a brand of Progress Rail, a Caterpillar subsidiary. EMD for years supplied most of the diesel-electrics for the railroad industry. Ultimately, two dozen railroads would acquire the FT.
Famous in its day—among locomotive fanciers, anyway—the FT probably is forgotten now except by the fatally dedicated. No one at today's EMD nor on today's railroads were around that far back in history. Were the FT somehow to come back, it wouldn't fit the patterns and practices of contemporary Santa Fe operations. Nor would it fit anywhere else.
The FT won't come back, of course, although even at this writing it's not altogether gone. The carbody of one section of the first FT built has been in a museum in St. Louis since 1961. It's memorialized as a national historical engineering landmark. Another unit that belonged originally to the Northern Pacific may still be around in Mexico.
The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway is anything but forgotten. What was long known simply as the Santa Fe, and then became part of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe, remains readily identifiable by tradition. The manner in which the former Santa Fe serves the nation's commerce has changed greatly over the years, as one might expect—and hope. After all, our story begins a long time ago.
We will look at freight dieselization from many vantage points, observing how, simultaneously, the FT was regarded as an engineering marvel, a balance sheet boon, an operational challenge, an employee threat, a wartime workhorse, and a new battleground for the labor unions.
