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NEW 5-17-24
BADGES?  Alfonso Bedoya: "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges." Presumbly you know the rest.  |
NEW 12-10-25
Staff has never encountered one of these before, but we figure that this was a Mechanical Department ID. The institutional appearance of the badge suggests that SP was indeed a family - a crime family. A couple of SP rails that we knew occasionally spent time in jail in between switching boxcars. Did these badges also function as prison ID's? 
As near as we can tell, this rather startling Action Comics style button appeared in the mid-1980's to promote some long-forgotten trains on the T&L lines. 
This button is the most attractive SP button that staff ever encountered. It advertised a 21st Century band whose members probably had never heard of the Southern Pacific Railroad. |
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Back in the 1980's, when SP was beginning to come apart at the seams, SP execs came up with a host of curatives, including heavy sponsorship the 1984 LA Olympics, which they highlighted by repainting SD40R #7347 in a very attractive Olympic theme. Unfortunately, it was what engineers used to call a "hoodoo" (see HERE, mid page), a cursed engine that crashed and burned in a BN head-on collision in 1985. SP also expended an equally effective considerable amount of money in other measures to boost shipper morale and employee efficacy. I personally own several very nice golf caps that I stole from a local official's desk drawer, after he told me that they were for officers only. Another example is buttons. |
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| At top-most right are a couple of button examples that I never encountered as an employee, but instead happened across on eBay. The red one is a bit of a puzzler on several levels. We assume that it was intended to be proudly worn by customers whose shipments were continually delayed by lack of crews and mechanical breakdowns. Perhaps some of the customers consciously flashed on Alfonso Bedoya as they received them. The second button obviously was intended as a fuel-saving gimmick for locomotive engineers. As it was, most engineers were already aware that they faced demerits if they cruised by a road foreman of engines with seven online units towing 23 cars. Besides, it was easy enough to isolate trailing units simply by ordering the fireman or brakeman to head back to them via the outside running boards at 60 mph. In any event,"turn 'em and burn 'em maintenance pretty well insured that SP units tended to automatically self-isolate anyway. Most engineers seemed to be of the "We don't need no badges" sort, although I can think of one now long-deceased Oakland engineer who might have attached it amid Playboy images glued to the outside of his grip. Added 5-19-24: Ex SP Conductor "40%' has kindly forwarded the green button seen immediately above , which may be the ultimate example of Market Street's insulation from Planet Earth, judging by how transportation deregulation actually worked out. The pin evidently was the product of Chairman Benjamin Biaggini's loud campaign in favor of deregulation as the savior of railroading from the evil competitive clutches of the trucking industry. How Biaggini allowed himself to become so detached from reality is one of the great unanswered mysteries of the Twentieth Century. Any working stiff out on the railroad could have told him that SP was too F'ed up to directly compete with trucks. One wonders if the post Staggers trucking industry came out with a revised button that read, "Deregulation Works - Ask the Truckers." Otherwise, I now happily collect these things, I suppose because I am careful to avoid engaging in any sort of deep introspection about why I would engage in this.- EO |
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