The Santa Fe–Southern Pacific merger was an attempted corporate consolidation of two of the major railroads in the Western United States at the time: the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Southern Pacific Railroad. The approximately $5-billion deal was announced in September 1983 and in March 1984, the companies asked the Interstate Commerce Commission for approval to merge their railroads. Confident the deal would be approved, the company began repainting their locomotives into a new unified red, yellow and black paint scheme that would allow the future railroad to be called SPSF. However, in a surprise July 1986 decision, the ICC denied the merger and gave the companies two years to split. Southern Pacific was sold to Rio Grande Industries in October 1988, and the former holding company renamed itself Santa Fe Pacific Corporation and retained the Santa Fe Railroad and all the non-railroad businesses of both predecessors.
Which left the Southern Pacific scrambling when some power needed to be repainted. As seen here, a few were repainted into the railroad's classic "Bloody Nose" grey and scarlet scheme, but for some reason they resorted to stencils to apply the roadname, yet seemed to still have the reflective Scotchlite™ SP Roman-style numbers on hand for the cab. Here we see recently repainted SP GP35 6523, not only with the "Hardware Store" lettering, but also no "SP" on the nose and an orange (orange?) "Los Angeles Division" stenciled under the cab number. (SP GP35 6587 was also painted this way, but it did get the gothic "SP" on its nose.)
