Southern Pacific Company Gold Bond - Kentucky 1924

Beautifully engraved RARE SPECIMEN certificate from the Southern Pacific Company Gold Bond dated 1924. This historic document was printed by the American Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a train at the station with porters carrying luggage. This is the first time we have had this bond for sale.






Certificate Vignette

The Southern Pacific Company was chartered in 1865 in California and later reincorporated in Kentucky (1885) and Delaware (1947). Small railroads—known collectively as the Southern Pacific—were built and merged after 1865 in S California to provide feeder lines to the Central Pacific RR and eventually to provide connections between San Francisco and New Orleans. The Southern Pacific RR survived the Panic of 1873 and inadequate financing, and in 1883, after the company had purchased several Texas railroads, Houston, Galveston, and New Orleans were reached.

In 1884 the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific railroads—which were conceived and constructed as parts of one system—were combined under the leadership of Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington as a unit of interdependent systems. Edward H. Harriman gained control (1901) of the Southern Pacific after Huntington's death and expanded the lines. The Southern Pacific Company added several smaller railroads in the 20th cent. In 1923, after the U.S. Supreme Court had directed (1922) the company to separate the control of the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, the Interstate Commerce Commission allowed the Southern Pacific to lease the Central Pacific's facilities. The Southern Pacific soon gained control of several bus lines in the Far West and in 1938 took over the trucking service previously provided by the Pacific Motor Transport Company.

At the end of World War II the company failed to resume operation of its steamship services from New York City and Baltimore to Galveston, thus abandoning a service that it had operated for over half a century. After a series of mergers and divestitures in the 1980s, the railroad emerged as the Southern Pacific Rail Corporation, a public corporation with a large business in containerized truck-to-train freight. The 1980s and 90s, however, saw the railroad consistently lose money on operations, and in 1996 it was merged into the Union Pacific.

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About Specimen Certificates

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.