Why a 'Yellow bonnett' scheme

[Atlanticflier]

Does any one know why Santa Fe had a 'Yellow Bonnett' scheme ? Was it assigned to special or dedicated trains ?
 Blue Bonnett was freight, War Bonnett was passenger - What was the Yellow Bonnet for ?

?

[3rdrail]

All blue was freight, war bonnet (red and silver) was passenger. When the passenger F's were downgraded to freight, a few were painted with blue where the red was and even fewer with yellow. The stainless steel panels were left unpainted. Soon after, the F's were converted to CF7's and disappeared rapidly.

The "yellow bonnet" scheme with the large "Santa Fe" on blue was a later scheme.

[Mark5]

I'm not a ATSF expert but I think this was just an experimental scheme as Santa Fe started playing around with schemes a bit after the advent of Amtrak ...

http://www.atsfry.com/1970s/hou-tex.htm

Mark

[randgust]

The "1960" scheme was the large "Santa Fe" on the side, blue body, yellow ends, pinstripe across the top, blue cab.  Standard freight.  The red and silver "warbonnet" was exclusively passenger - put on everything from E-units, F-units, FP45, U28CG, and U30CG units.

When Amtrak started on May 1, 1971, Santa Fe really had issues with it.  They wanted to distance themselves from the entire passenger train issue after a difficult decision.  And, to make things even worse, they  had "Ship and Travel Santa Fe" over a LOT of freight cars.

They kept the good power - the FP45's, etc., and leased Amtrak the dogs - the old F7's, until they literally dropped.  By 1972, they wanted a new image, post passenger.  They took the U28CG scheme - which was the only red and silver put on a road switcher - and simply changed the colors to blue and yellow.  That, in June 1972, became the "Yellowbonnet".  They changed the paint scheme right in the middle of the GE U36C order with the first units delivered in the old scheme and the rest delivered in Yellowbonnet.  Along with that, any locomotive that just happened in the shops got the scheme. 

The U36C's in the new yellowbonnet made the cover of the 1972 annual report.

At the same time, the "Ship and Travel" scheme was replaced by the "Santa Fe" billboard scheme across the board - again, showing that the company was getting into a new post-passenger age.

I'm guessing that somebody, somewhere, ordered that ALL the red warbonnet paint got ditched.  So when the leased Amtrak F units came in for shopping...uh...now what?  So they were released back out in a variety of hybrid schemes - yellow with solid blue heralds, yellow with pinstripe heralds - and the stainless-steel units that hadn't been leased and were regeared for freight got it too, some got blue instead of red, but NOTHING post June, 1972 ever saw red paint again until the Super Fleet in the 90's.  The few holdouts in red and silver could be counted on two hands - the 5942 and 5944 FP45's, and 8002 on the U30CG's, and the unshopped Amtrak leased F7's.

The only 'tweaks' on the yellow-bonnet were that about 1973 they started to paint the trucks silver instead of black, and that stuck - and handrails became all yellow instead of blue stanchions and yellow rails.

In July of 1972 I was rocketing along in the Amtrak "Chief" from Chicago to LA (at the ripe old age of 15) and spotted my first "Yellowbonnet" in Kansas and got a shot of it with my Kodak Instamatic. It's a blurred shot but appears to be a GP39.  I was stunned.  What the heck was THAT?????  Thst was the only unit I spied in that scheme the entire trip.

'72-73 was a great period if you love variety in paint on ATSF as it was a transition period and you got just about everything from the U36C's back to F7's in tradition warbonnet red and silver running on Amtrak.  That's why I model it!

[Walkercolt]

I think we're talking about two different things here. The "Yellowbonnets" are the F units with silver carbodies that had the cabs painted Yellow, mainly as a visbility experiment. The "Bluebonnets" were F's that had the noses painted blue, not really as "freight" units, per say, but actually as a way to mark them for a maintaince program. After the Black and silver Zebra stripes on freight units, Santa Fe started painting freight units ATSF Blue with yellow stripes, which turned into a Yellow Warbonnet shape. There is much mythology about the various colors applied to the noses of the F-units near the end of their service. By this time, they had all been re-geared to 87MPH max, which made them "freight units". The 103MPH geared F-3's had been re-built to "freight" F-7 specs, to the point where you had to have roster numbers to tell what kind of "F units" they started life as. Most lost their "chicken wire" and recieved Farr stainless grills, and most lost some or all of their "portholes". Finally, the F-units with any life in them became totally rebuilt as "CF-7's" which are a whole 'nother chapter.

[Nato]

  I was fortunate to be in LA several times during the Amquak (Trak) era and witnessed trains in passenger service pulled by leased Santa Fe F Units with both the Yellow replacing the Red and with Dark Blue replacing the Red at the same time there were still quite a few units in the original Red and Silver scheme.Yes this was at the time when Santa Fe fought with Amtrack, who they had let use the Super Chief name,Amtrak was downgrading the service so Santa Fe revoked the use of the Copyrighted Super Chief name and the train became Southwest Limited ,also the Chief which had been re instated for one season as a second transcontinental train was again dropped. Of course with service up grades in in 1980's SF relented and allowed Chief to be used as part of the name, it is now the  Southwest Thief (Chief). Nate Goodman (Nato). Salt Lake, Utah.

[randgust]

Here's the evolution...it gets confusing....fun to model though.

U36C order, new 1972 (8700 class)- 8704 in the 1960 scheme and 8718 in the yellowbonnet (note the black, not silver, trucks)
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=140519&nseq=20
This appears to be the only factory order that got split, some units in one scheme and some in the other, depending on the date delivered.  That always told me that this was a 'snap decision' when even GE got caught by surprise.

Amtrak got the red and silver F-units, a selected group under lease, but ATSF still did the maintenance:
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=99761&nseq=59
Anything that did hit the shops, whether in freight or passenger, got the new yellow treatment in the 'appropriate' scheme.  This applied to Amtrak-leased units shopped by ATSF and regeared freight units...
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=218695&nseq=14
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=233843&nseq=10

The detail lettering and striping inconsistency on the yellowbonnets as applied to the F's was fascinating..
The handful of 'bluebonnets' was supposedly (according to McMillan) because neither Amtrak nor Santa Fe thought the yellow looked acceptable on F's..
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=16624&nseq=121

I 'think' that at least one Bluebonnet was an Amtrak leased unit; not sure.  Most 'seemed' freight by coincidence.

A small group of F9's got a blue body and yellow nose, just to keep things interesting..but they didn't have stainless steel sides, either.

As the new Amtrak SDP40F's arrived in 1973, the F7's were turned back to ATSF and were regeared if necessary and thrown into the freight pool until they were converted to CF7's.  Most of them ended up in Texas and Kansas (flatlander country) in secondary services.  That was a wild couple of years...

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=53796&nseq=100

The one thing I've found out in all my research is that absolutely nothing, anywhere, got new red warbonnet paint after the yellowbonnet was announced in June '72, and they improvised on the F's because of it.  I personally feel that the yellowbonnet on F's was a response to the 'we're not allowed to paint anything red' than a concerted effort to do anything more complicated than that!

The other thing that's 'cool' about the '72 Yellowbonnet was that there wasn't a concerted effort to take an entire class or a group and systematically repaint it.  Whatever hit the shops, in whatever order, got it.   It's like a date stamp across the entire railroad seeing that scheme.  There were inconsistencies, holdouts, evolutionary changes like the silver trucks, one-of-a-kinds, and some true 'What were they THINKING???' applications....
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=99159&nseq=0

To anybody that ever thought that the red and silver warbonnet was the highest and best use of paint on a locomotive of all time... that is just....wrong....  sort of like a thoroughbred evolving into a camel...

EDIT:  Oh, one more thing.   When I was on Amtrak #19 in July '72, we were running late west of Dodge City and REALLY moving fast. Power was red warbonnet F7A/F7B/F7A/F7B, train was baggage, two hi-levels, ex-CBQ dome/lounge, diner, two pullmans, two more pullmans and a coach added at KC (National Limited).  I started to time mileposts and we were consistently doing 38-second miles - 95mph.  After the fifth consecutive mile at that rate I decided I wasn't seeing things.  So at least THOSE F-units had never been regeared!  Other than the NE Corridor, I've never moved faster on track.

[Walkercolt]

I don't own it, but one of my friends in the club has loaned me Stagner's "Bible" on the Santa Fe, and Marc did a slide presentation on the various paint jobs the F-units recieved, and why. Marc's also a memeber of the ATSF Historical Society, makes all their meetings and meets, and can probably tell you what window and seating arrraigment all ATSF passenger cars ever had and what year, by heart. I can't come close to any of that.