first E-units. For all the chang- es made over their service lives, none of the F3 Long Bonnets saw a trip to the paint booth and re- turn to the more standard version of the road’s famous Warbonnet. This isn’t the first model re- leased of the Long Bonnet paint job, though it’s an uncommon selection for manufacturers to produce. There is a tendency to dismiss this important bit of railroad history, and many of those offered in this paint job have been low-end, inexpensive products lacking key details. But that’s not the case here; this is a Walthers Proto line HO- scale F3 Long Bonnet release. Outwardly, the paint is both ac- curate and excellent, with crisp detail and fine masking. Impor- tant separately applied parts range from metal screen wire dy- namic brake grilles to the ATS shoe. Automatic Train Stop (ATS) is a system that mounts a “shoe” around the front journal of the rear truck on the engineer’s side. On the prototypes, if an engineer missed obeying a signal, the sys- tem brought the train to a stop. The ATS shoe is an important de- tail often missed in other models
of this locomotive but included on this Walthers Proto release. The stainless steel side grilles are the correct vertical type, as in- stalled by the railroad in the early 1950s. Vertical side louvers for filtered air are also as installed in the upgrade to these F-units. The fans are the tall, Phase I style. By the time EMD got to the Phase III production in 1948, these fans were shortened consider- ably, though Santa Fe’s 16 to 21 F3s retained taller fan housings.
This model comes wearing Wal- thers’ Proto MAX metal magnetic knuckle couplers, something I’ve long encouraged for use on all locomotives since couplers take quite a beating. The space be- tween diesels on F-unit sets has always been a modeling problem. The physical distance between two coupled F-units is 36 inch- es, which in HO scale would be 0.41379 inches. Since the truck
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