I watched some Charles Smiley DVD’s on the Southern Pacific in its final years and saw how short of power they were. There usually was a least one leased unit on every train. There were even times when SP used some their old SD9’s in mainline service on the Shasta Line! SP had almost all of their worn-out EMD’s out on the road and had almost no down time until 1994 when the company bought the SD70M’s. I don’t know how SP recovered from its slump of the failed SPSF merger.
SP was already in a slump before the merger, although the merger attempt stripped SP of its profitable non rail businesses, which hurt SP more. See “And Then the Golden Empire Came Crashing Down” in the March 2005 issue of Trains. Did SP ever really recover? I would say it didn’t.
Good point. There really hasn’t been a very healthy SP since at least the 1970’s, probably even before then. Their business never was the same after the building of Colton Yard in 1973.
For a railroad going downhill financially in the 1970s and beyond, SP put on a great show. At least the story has a happy ending (or bittersweet depending on how you look at it), with SP being folded into another railroad instead of it becoming the “Rock Island of the 1990s” facing the suspension of all operations and liquidation.
I’ve been a real estate agent for the past 6 years although it’s not my primary job anymore. My broker and his brother worked for Southern Pacific at Englewood Yard here in Houston. When they talk about their railroad days, they refer to SP as the Sufferin’ Pacific.
Englewood gets most of the blame for causing UP’s meltdown during the 1990s.
Has the yard been significantly upgraded since then, or did Union Pacific simply move some of the work to other locations?
Dale,
Englewood was not the problem…UP management was.
They tried to make Englewood do something it was never designed to do, which was classify and block out all the traffic from the Houston Metro area.
Before, most of the petrochemical traffic from the south side of the Houston Ship Channel was run through Strang, humped, blocked and classified before it was run on a transfer to Englewood…in fact, a lot of it was run directly out of Strang and never reached Englewood.
They failed to listen to the SP folks who warned them that you should keep anything you can out of Englewood…if you can build the train up at Strang or Settagast, and run it around Englewood, that keeps tracks free at Englewood, which always ran at capacity.
Yards are finite in their capacity to switch and hold cars, dwell time over 48 hours means you have a big problem somewhere.
UP managed to swamp Englewood by bringing everything in to it for switching, and cutting back operations at outlying yards.
Strang ceased hump operations and switching, and became basically a storage facility.
Plus the UP failed to keep or retain the SP’s institutional knowledge by replacing most of the key people who had been keeping SP fluid here…they altered the operational practices to conform with what they, the UP, felt was the “right” way to run a railroad, forgetting or ignoring that these guys had kept the SP running literally on a shoestring budget.
When you fire all the folks that know all the tricks to keeping things moving…
Englewood has had some upgrades, but the real reason it works now is the UP finally listened to the old heads who had kept it running…work that can be done somewhere else is best left out in the weeds…that and working out an agreement with the BNSF for directional running has loosened things up quite a lot.
Thanks Ed.
It sounds like the hardware (yards) are basically the same as 11 years ago, but the software (operations) were changed.
Is Englewood (ex SP) still a hump yard, and is Stettegast (ex MP) still flat switched?
Englewood is still a major hump yard in Houston. I went and photographed around there a few months ago and UP was humping quite a bit of traffic. Settegast, I usually see a lot of MP15’s to SD40-2’s lined up waiting for their next assignment. Both yards have intermodal facilities.
Steve
While it’s very hard to pinpoint one watershed event as marking the beginning of SP’s long slide, it seems ironic that the beginning of the 1970s is such a good choice for a general period. Just as the carrier was finally being freed of its hated intercity passenger business (on which it had given up maybe 20 years prior), other events were taking it down.
Post World War II, SP had a good long ride on economic expansion in the Western U.S. and, if memory serves me here, it netted nearly $100 million, after tax, in 1969. (Note to our younger readers: Before our national currency was so badly debased in the last four decades, that was a LOT of money!)
Did it ever make bucks like that (inflation-adjusted) again? I don’t recall that it did, and other huge forces beyond its control were beginning to hurt it. Obviously, the trouble didn’t begin in 1970, or even ten years prior, but that’s about when some old looming problems reached critical mass. The company still did some things very well, but there seems to have been a bad case of institutional rot.
For those of you who are intrigued by this sad story, the 2005 Trains magazine article (cited earlier in this thread) is an excellent read. I recall that it also points out how little management attention was paid to the valuable Texas operations.
Dale,
Yes and yes…
Last time I was over there, they were adding what looked like engine fuel service facilities right off to the north of the hump, next to Liberty road…I have not be by in a while, so I am not really sure if that was what they were building or not, but thats what it looked like 6 months ago.
SP was “the” railroad here for a long time…they had Hardy Street Yard, with a backshop that could construct a locomotive pretty much from the frame up, and do all heavy car repair, up to and including complete rebuilds.
Hardy Street yard is gone now, sold to developers.
Settagast is north, (up), and PTRA North yard is south(down).
If you scroll to the left and follow the tracks, you can find the intermodal ramp, and then what is left of Hardy Street Yard.
There are at least 17 rail yards I can think of off the top of my head here in Houston…not all UP/SP but they are…
LLoyd, Casey,(BNSF S.I.T.) Eureka, Hardy Street, BNSF’s Hub, (intermodal) Settagast, Englewood, East Yard, BNSFs New South Yard, and Old South Yard, Strang, Barbours Cut, (intermodal) Basin Yard, Booth Yard, and the PTRA’s 5 major yards, North Yard, Pasadena, American Yard, Penn City Yards and the Storage Yards(city docks included), UPs Dayton Yard, (S.I.T.) plus many many smaller private yards.
This is equally interesting and frustrating. I have 1600 magazines here, and the only articles I can find on Houston are in the 10-99 Trains (Chemical Coast) and 1-79 Railfan (HB&T).
How do the other guys (BNSF) serve Houston? Somerville is something like 100 miles away(?). Is BNSF now based out of the former HB&T yard?
I still can’t believe Texas finished 14th in that Trains survey last year. It should have been fighting PA for 3rd place, behind Illinois and California.
I agree, Dale,
It is frustrating that Houston gets almost no railfan press, although we have a tremendous amount of trackage inside the county.
The HB&T was dissolved, and BN inheireted the Santa Fe parts…combine that with the old Fort Worth & Denver (FW&D) main line, a joint venture between the CB&Q and Rock Island,
and the fact that where ever the old HB&T could go, which was virtually the entire city, the BNSF can go too all gives the BNSF access pretty much everywhere.
Additionally, they have the Santa Fe’s main to Galveston, the main into Houston from Temple, which gives them exclusive right to the HP&L power plant with coal deliveries, plus inheriting both New South Yard, Old South Yard and the East Belt Yard from HB&T, and the fairly new purpose built Casey S.I.T. yard, all combined to give BNSF a pretty good presence here.
Part of the agreement to the SP/UP merger was the creation of a joint dispatching center…located in Lloyd yard, a former MoPac yard just outside of Spring Texas, a few miles to the north, the dispatching center has several “desks” with each alternately manned by either a UP or a BNSF dispatcher…the idea is that no one railroad will control all the dispatching at any give time.
The concept is that all trains are treated the same, the idea being to move all the traffic into and out of the metroplex as efficiently as possible…so you might have a BNSF train on UP tracks, being given priority over a UP train simply to get the BN into, say, the PTRA…all dispatched by a UP dispatcher.
Add in a basic directional running pattern, and they move a lot of trains into and out of this place.
The FW&D, which is just down the block from my house, sees 15 to 20 BNSF trains every 24 hours…midnight to early morning sees inbounds, afternoons see a little both ways plus the local Casey Turn, and evenings sees almost solid out bounds… in the time it took to write this, t
That helps a bunch!
Thanks Ed. [tup]
It sounds like all the railroading in the Houston area is intertwined. When UP had it’s meltdown, did it bog down BN(SF) as well?
Murphy,
It bogged down every one…we (the PTRA) couldn’t get any more cars into our yards simply because the UP wouldn’t pull any cars out…they had no where to take them to.
BNSF couldn’t interchange with them…couldn’t get into Englewood or Settagast to drop off or pick up and the only place they had to go was New and Old South Yard…which meant every thing BN brought into Houston had to come through Temple, around the south side of town and then back in…
It was a mess, and got to the point we told UP if they didn’t come pull their cars, we would’t accept any more cars from them or their “customers” because we were jammed up.
There were trains parked on almost every siding the UP had within 50-100 miles of Houston. UP was short of power all around Houston - it was all in the sidings. This problem also led to crews hogging out on trains in the sidings. Sometimes a crew would be called for a train that never moved. Even the local TV and newspaper media started to notice the meltdown - then you know you have a problem!
A similar problem is happening in Spring’s yard, too. BNSF, UP and the PTRA have set up several dispatchers’ centers to coordinate with UP dispatchers in Omaha and BNSF dispatchers in Ft. Worth. For them, their goal is to just keep the trains running into Spring moving.
Steve,
All the dispatching for the Houston/Harris county metroplex is done right there in your backyard…the old MoPac center is the dispatching center…TD2 and TD3 are housed there.
We at the PTRA have to deal with them daily because we use some of the UP and old HB&T track, and it is CTC.
The UP and BNSF set up the center for exactly the reason you stated…Spring and Lloyd yard, and almost all of the Hardy Street “raceway” or double track project had become a parking lot for trains…Englewood was gridlocked, Settagast was jam packed, East Yard was full and every siding on the Dayton sub had a train in it.
I may be mistaken, but I believe the Joint Dispatch Center handles traffic all the way to Teague, Temple and almost to Beaumont…I will try and find out their limits Saturday when I go to work.
The idea was that everything headed into Houston be under the control of one “desk” so to speak, and to establish a form of directional running…so far, it has worked.
I remember UP crews getting out of the cab at the PTRA, getting on an outbound train…and sitting all 12 hours and never turning a wheel…this on transfer trains which only had to move all of two miles to Englewood or Settagast.
I would leave work, come in the next day, and see the same train, with a new crew, sitting in the same place we built it…days on end…
Ed: I see huricane(?) Dolly is causing some headaches down your way. Has it affected railway operations at all? How about past hurricanes, Katrina and Rita(?) for example, what problems do they cause locally?
( Am I the only one who has a problem with hurricane Dolly? Shouldn’t they at least save that name for some big hurricane? Like, if we ever have twin hurricanes?[}:)])