GLAMOUR GIRL 3461
By David Morgan
One of my favorite “glamour girls,” unlike her stage and screen sisters, appears in few films and never haunts a movie production. She has looks and plenty of curves, but hardly of the sort seen in Carole Landis. No, the 3461 is a husky Santa Fe passenger locomotive-the type that makes speed history and performance records. Her legs, drivers I mean, are rather high-seven feet in diameter-and she rolls along on six of these giants discs. They in turn support a form, her boiler, that boasts genuinely good lines to any railroad man. This boiler, heated by a tremendous firebox, produces a pressure of 300 pounds per square inch. Yes, she is fast-a regular hot mama! Railroaders will tell you that combination is pure and simple concentrated TNT.
3461 comes of a family of six identical sisters. One, 3460, youngest of the lot, boasts a blue and silver sweater, otherwise known as streamlining, and this garb rates her somewhat more attention than her equally curvesome sisters. What has this pin-up of mine done, you ask? Where can you see her beautiful contours? 3461 works in no studio, but can be seen racing across Illinois and Kansas at eighty miles an hour-that’s her “stage.” She pulls the “Chief,”
overnight Pullman hauls, and troop trains. Yes, 3461 is a wartime “glamour girl,” doing more than her share for the boys overseas.
Originally Published: Louisville Male High School Literary Magazine The Spectator,
November, 1944
REPRINT BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
the COALITION for SUSTAINABLE RAIL and
Louisville Male High School Alumnus - CHARLES CASTNER