The museum's two F-7 locomotives were built by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division in 1953. The locomotives served on railways including Southern Pacific, the Port of Allegheny Railroad, and the Connecticut Department of Transportation before coming to the museum in 2011. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe granted the museum permission to use Santa Fe's iconic red and yellow "Warbonnet" Scheme to commemorate the passenger train, Texas Chief. The Texas Chief trains number 15 and 16 operated between Galveston and Chicago from 1948 to 1967. The museum's F-7 locomotives were 300 series – so numbering these 315 and 316 honors both these pieces of our history.   You may notice some not-quite-ATSF things about these, but we hope that you will enjoy them as much as we do.

Here are a few you might like to know about:

The 5 Chime Horns are from the Texas Limited which ran from Houston to Galveston as a private train for a number of years.  Those F-7s (a gift to the museum by George Mitchell) were destroyed by Hurricane Ike in 2008.

The front doors with the headlights were also salvaged from the Texas Limited.  These F7s did not have the lower light and all Passenger F-7s for ATSF did.

You might also note that there are no portholes on the side.  Santa Fe used porthole shaped windows on their F-7 units. 

The snowplow shaped section is not the same design used by the Santa Fe, but was used on many northern railroads where snow was a constant problem.