smitty195 Wrote:
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> What an ugly beast! I never knew that they ran
> that train to Santa Cruz. I remember stepping off
> the Starlight in Portland and seeing this thing
> parked on the station track. Ugly!!!

IIRC, this was one of several "model" trains ATK was running around the country for demo purposes. The German ICE train (which was actually an Israeli trainset borrowed for the occasion) and the Talgos. IIRC it was a Talgo set that they inched out on the ill-fated Monterey (Brooklyn Bridge) branch in August '99 to demonstrate what could be done, only to find that the track was in such rotten shape, regardless of the dusting of cosmetically "new" ballast for Photo purposes, that they couldn't demo very much. After that fiasco, UP summarily removed the switch at Castroville and nary a wheel has turned on the rails since. My good friend, the late Danny Boehr, was in charge of these demo train projects for ATK and somewhere I have an hilarious post he wrote about unloading the ICE train off the boat at the Baltimore shipyards----something about German train with Israeli translator on Liberian boat with Yugoslavian crew and assorted union types on the docks, not to mention a sizeable dent incurred on one train car by a giant hook.
C.