General Electric P32BWH

In 1991, Amtrak acquired twenty General Electric DASH 8-32BWH (Amtrak calls this model P32BH), a model were based on Santa Fe’s contemporary 500-series GE’s (built a year earlier).

As-built, Amtrak’s DASH 8-32BWH locomotives featured a novel modern paint scheme, which some observers compared to the coloration used by Pepsi on its 12-ounce aluminum cola cans, and so these were unofficially known as “Pepsi Cans.” In the early 1990s, they were often assigned in pairs to Amtrak’s West Coast services.

On February 7, 1994, I caught a pair of ‘Pepsi Cans’ leading the LA-bound Coast Starlight on Southern Pacific’s street trackage at Jack London Square in Oakland, California.

I exposed this Kodachrome 25 slide using my Nikon F3T with 28mm Nikkor wideangle lens. This image has been published several times, including as an illustration in Passenger Train Journal issue 197 that came out in the mid-1990s.

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