Remember the BN Railroad...the friendly line!

Oh how I miss the BN green on F units and Geeps. here we have a collection of them heading the wrong way on the flow of traffic that I see going the other way on eastbounds. Latah bridge is just to the left. I-90 is in the background and lovely Spokane as well. 

Last week someone complained about the railroads on the front page of the Review. Like they go too fast at 79 MPH through Spokane plus other gripes. It was full of mis-statements and lies. Here is a sign at Yardley back in the day that limits passenger and freight trains. On top of that downtown Spokane has a 25 MPH rule plus the (2) passenger trains (Amtrak) has to stop at the station so they start at 0 to go either way.  The foreign power were passing through BN territory.

 

 Remember the personalized trailers that BN put on the rails? I don't know if Spokane was one of them but there were many cities featured. They are all gone including the BN AMERICA containers.

As the non-official BN photographer of the day here I am shooting 2 F45s in 2 color schemes including the latest being in BN colors. No one said boo to me as I certainly was not a worker in my office clothes.

And the winner of the ugly BN caboose scheme is........? This one of kind color scheme was at Whitefish yard scaring all the moose and bears away.

 Remember the first AC power units on the BN? Now they are as common as thieves in Chicago, IL. My son rode these units to Pasco when he was a brakeman and I caught them on the way back east passing Erie St. yard in downtown Spokane.

The Funnel has a drain!

All BNSF traffic from Sandpoint west to Spokane comes in on one rail line ( ex-NP ) and it ends right here. The Latah Bridge is to the left where it has a Wye at the other end that send traffic to Seattle (North leg) or Portland (South leg). The rails dropping down on the right is the old NP line that drops down the South Hill to Marshal where the 2 lines come back together that go south.  I saw a UP train with red CP power that I thought would be a good shot on the Latah Bridge as I knew that they would come over the Latah Bridge as that is one way traffic on the south bound traffic. They never made it in the 45 minutes I was there.

I was the red signal that gave me confidence that it would shortly come out of downtown Spokane but maybe something else was coming to hold him in downtown.

 

With so much traffic noise I almost did not catch this eastbound from Seattle drifting down to the north leg of the wye pulling a bunch of ballast hoppers with sun panels for electricity to open the gates.

 

As the train crossed the Latah bridge I noticed the biker on the old Union Pacific right of way that came into town across the UP High Bridge that is now a bike path crossing I-90.

 

Standing under the wye I also looked at the old SP&S right of way that came out of Hillyard on the GN line. The Feds/and/or/Washington State built a nice new road crossing over I-90 as well.

Latah bridge is a box girder system that is simple yet strong enough to hold many tons of freight trains going on 40 years. A buddy of mine Bruce Nelson was able to walk through this bridge with a friend that would inspect it for cracks. They found one that was letting in sunlight and they closed the bridge for 2 days to patch the crack. Hey, I didn't say it was perfect!

Searching for the electrics when there were electrics to chase.

I was searching through my slide collection, now CD collection, including the famous Chuck Heimerdinger photos and realized how much traveling he did back in the early 60s mostly in the west and Canada. Chuck made it to Arizona to catch the Black Mesa coal business with modern electrics.

Chuck is well known for his trip up to Washington and Montana and here he caught all 3 mainline power selections in one place. This is the Deer Lodge yard where a Little Joe, Boxcab and Bi-Polar electrics gather for their next assignment. The yellow was the Milwaukee making a deal with UP and some passenger assignments they cooperated on.

Up the road from Deer Lodge was the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific. They made it to Butte and Anaconda but fell short on the Pacific portion. They hauled ore from the mine in Butte to the smelter in Anaconda. At one time I had the headlight to the #65.

More modern than the boxcabs on the BA&P were there unique diesel looking things with pantographs on top. The yellow thing to the left is a line repair car, non electric for good reasons.

Back in the trolley days these cars were common but on the Yakima Valley Traction it was unique.

 

In California the Big Red cars of Los Angeles were well known but General Motors took care of them with some shifty deals. 

 

 

Mine your own business ....with a train!

Let's say you own a piece of property and someone tells you  its worth a fortune but you need to go down 500, 700, or 1000 feet

to find it. What do you do to bring it up to the top?

Build a railroad would be one answer. That's what they did in Utah to bring out the copper ore so we can have a better life with the commodity available to use in products.

 

Chuck Heimerdinger got permission to travel around the mine to take these photos some 50 years ago. Look at the grades these electric trains had to deal with. That took a lot of men and machines to make it work.

Everything is big...and dangerous. Old #728 has a crane in tow for some project down the hill.

Ugly brutes they are as they are as utilitarian as you can get.

 

Once on the flat bigger and more modern electrics take over to get the ore to the smelter.

The weird stuff seems to be gone on the U.S. railroad scene!

The Rock Island Rockets lashed together seems to say the experiment is over. It was an attempt to make passenger train costs lower but pulling bus bodies on the rails was a dismal failure.

A more conventional way to pull commuter trains was with E units in Chicago. Back then BN trains had white/orange noses for better visibility for cars and people to get out of the way.

 

On top of the weird list should be this odd ball where the builder took 2 switch engines and connected them with one cab so you could not tell which way was the front. Either could the engineer and that was the point working in the yard. Twice the power than a regular unit.

 

Common to most railroads were towers that guarded rail crossings where they were responsible for one train occupying the crossing at any one time. When two trains did...someone got killed or fired.

This Alco product had the longest nose in railroad history. They could have had a bathroom and shower in there plus a railroad reading library like we have at Evergreen!

 

We sometimes forget that other railroads had Little Joes other than the Milwaukee Road. Three of them went to the South Shore near Chicago in the fire sale General Electric had back in 1950 when the U.S. embargoed them from the USSR back in the good old Cold War days.

Another feeble attempt to make switch engines more engineer friendly was Alco's effort for the C-415. This one had only 1 engine with a shaft that ran through the cab to work the other truck.

Wishram was a railroad town!

No doubt about it, without the railroad only lonely fishermen would visit this place. But it does have a railroad and it was one of the most interesting in the west. It's the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railroad and it sits on a wide spot along the north bank of the Columbia River in Washington State. It's hillsides are the famous columnar Basalt rock that came from volcanic activity that is hard as a rock. Wait!  It is rock! 

 

It was also famous for the locomotive power that SP&S featured which was Alco locos in all sizes.

 

Here we have an Alco in 2 forms of power with 2 axles per truck and 3 axles per truck, more HP and more traction power to get the train over the line.

A large 6 axle unit called an C-636 ( 6 axles and 3600 horsepower )starts across the Columbia heading for the Inside gateway into Oregon to connect with the Western Pacific at the Keddee Wye in California.

 

The Northern Pacific's Granite Lake Tragedy

A number of years ago Mike Applegate, Mike Lustig, Terry Frank and I visited the scene of the worst Northern Pacific

train wreck in their history where the North Coast Limited was going too fast into a 30 mile per hour curve at 70 MPH.

 

3 F unit locomotives left the track without making an impression on the rails and landed into the water of Granite Lake, Idaho about 50 miles east of Spokane, Washington. The year was the early 60s.

 

Burt and Ernie (Keith) take photos from the same spot that the passenger cars are located in the prior picture. Marvin and I stayed on the concrete support that was

the east end of the bridge.

I know the engineer and fireman were killed But I don't remember if any passengers were as well.

 

To the rescue was NP wrecker #45, a staple of the Northern Pacific's equipment based in Parkwater. (Spokane)

 

In the distance is the current NP/BN/BNSF mainline the the NP did and changed the routing to avoid this dangerous curve especially if you don't slow down enough.

 

The prior photo was taken about where the NP diesel is located on the bridge approach. It looked all different today and you could not find it easy if you don't have some historic reference where it is.

 

Editor's Note (i.e. Jerry Jr): These photos reminded me of a recent derailment on the MRL in Montana where three Boeing fuselages fell into the adjacent river:

  

 

 

Real Life Weathering at Snoqualmie Falls in Washington State

Sure Snoqualmie Falls has a beautiful falls by that's not why I think of this town. The Northwest Railway Museum has this restored NP station as well as other stuff. On the way back home from Tacoma last week we stopped by to see what was new and exciting.

 

 

On summer weekends it has live steam engines that pull passengers on a long piece of NP rails plus dozens of old pieces of railroad equipment including this small articulated engine that was built for the back woods of the Northwest.

 

Along the road near the station are many pieces of equipment in rough shape. Like many museums they can acquire more equipment than they have money to restore the stuff. The machinery to make it run is the V-2 motor that runs a crank shaft the works the wheels. Rough work but it was the best they had back in the day.

 

This old steam crane could sure use a paint job but 31 inches of rain near Seattle will wear out most improvements quickly. The Seahawks sure like the rain! Does Denver get rain?

 

When I got to Spokane in 1967 I saw this loco in the back yard of the Inland Empire Paper Mill in Millwood, Washington. It wasn't running but it sure didn't look this bad. Did I mention it rains a lot on the other side of the mountains?

 

The final insult to this diverse collection of stuff is this electric work car that seems to have collapsed on itself in a desperate manner. Looks beyond saving but I don't have a vote.

 

 

 

 

The amazing Washington State History Museum in Tacoma!

They didn't build it in Spokane! We had to do it on our own! This building is next to the old NP Tacoma station and is it a beauty.  They had lots of stuff in here but we are after the railroad end of it. The other guys with us were Ron, Stan and Sid from the great state of Wenatchee.

 

This shows the railroads of the area using HO models and did they do a terrific job. They have 50 volunteers but 20 do most of the work. Every scene is a copy of the real thing. The bridges, the factories, stations, etc. I heard about it but this is the first time I saw it. The edge treatment was unique as it is an antiqued pattern instead of black, or green or some solid color. I like it! Everything built was by volunteers.

The overhead wire is for the Milwaukee Road part of the layout. Not only was it big but the detail was impressive.

It was very impressive and I want to go back. Everyone should see it and you don't need to be a modeler.

 

This is the Northern Pacific roundhouse in Tacoma and I saw the real thing some 30 years ago on the

day before they were to tear it down.

It's the real thing just like the Coke commercials used to say before they came out with the other Coke. The NP line parallels the Milwaukee tracks for many miles on the coast.

Is it big? It's real big! Look at the 3 levels of holding tracks and scenery displays. We asked about the funding and they had $20,000 start up money with $8,000 per year since then. We got into the inner part of the layout when Marvin asked if we could! We were modelers after all...the brotherhood.