As far as we can tell from where the photos were taken, by 1950 these units had been moved around to various divisions. By that time at least some diesel service facilities existed at just about all the major terminals. It’s hard to say exactly when ‘locomotive sets’ started to be broken up, but it didn’t take long. By the mid-fifties it was beginning to be common to see any units that could be MUed together, in freight service or in passenger service, to be mixed and matched. That left the few Baldwin road units out in the cold.

I believe the very first dieselization, with the FTs during the war, would have been somewhat limited in where they were operated due to the requirements for both diesel fueling and service facilities plus crew training, as well as to ‘keep an eye on them’ to see that they were behaving right and to see that they got as much utilization as possible. The Dupo – Little Rock – Texarkana run was the heaviest traffic on the railroad, so a natural for this. Once more divisions acquired the service facilities, it seems have become open season fairly quickly.

By 1950 the biggest steam engines were being pushed out to divisions where they had been rare before, such as Wichita Division, primarily because of dieselization of the more major main lines. Stagner’s ‘Missouri Pacific Steam Finale in Kansas’ has a discussion on this.

RG7