Through the passenger years, the Santa Fe ads featuring the brightly-colored locomotives appeared monthly in National Geographic, Time, Life and a score of travel and general interest magazines.

But it was in the toy train field that most people encountered the Santa Fe Warbonnet. Lionel and American Flyer had licenses to produce models of the Warbonnet locomotives; Lionel had the O gauge F3 with its bright red "bulldog" nose, and American Flyer made the S gauge ALCO PA with its long, squared-off nose. Unlike the present days of corporate licensing fees, it was said that the Santa Fe actually paid Lionel to model the Warbonnet locomotives.

For many years American Flyer Santa Fe diesel models could be seen in the window of the Gilbert Hall of Science in New York City, and hundreds of department store windows across the nation featured Lionel and American Flyer Warbonnets.

The Warbonnet could be seen everywhere. In the Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye motion picture White Christmas, a cutaway shows a Warbonnet racing along the coast as they travel from Miami to New York, a three-thousand mile continuity error!

When Alco introduced its famous PA diesel they cut a hole in the back wall of New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel and shoved the first fifteen feet of a full-size locomotive right into the banquet room. Headlights blazing, the Warbonnet scheme left no question as to what railroad had purchased the first unit.

There are those who steadfastly maintain that Santa Fe's Super Chief, an all stainless steel streamliner running between Chicago and Los Angeles, was America's most famous and finest train, a train with a reputation so fine that Santa Fe refused to let Amtrak continue the name, lest it be sullied in memory by subsequent service.

Four decades into the history of the Illinois Railway Museum, we have at last acquired a Warbonnet locomotive. Built in 1967 for the last incarnation of the famed Super Chief, FP45 number 92 proudly carries on the Warbonnet tradition.

From the Rail & Wire, Issue 165