The Major SP Motive Power Shortage

Trains Magazine General Discussion
21

Locally, all Dolly did was bring us some badly needed rain in the form of a few thundershowers, and a day of medium rain.

Brownsville got hammered pretty good, power out for a lot of folks for a few day…so KCS might be having a few problems, but as for disrupting rails service, no real impact at all.

Katrina and Rita did almost nothing here, although Katrina did interrupt a lot of traffic from New Orleans…

The worst for us was Tropical Storm Allison, which hit the city dead on and flooded every thing…power out city wide, all the major streets flooded and all the freeways closed meant no crews could get to work…as for damage to the rail infrastructure, not a lot, but without electricity, signals don’t work, radios batteries can’t be recharged, computers don’t work.

For those of us who did managed to get into work, we discovered the fun of old fashion yard work, where you walk a track, hand write a list, and switch cars from a hand written list and cheat sheets, all the time using hand and lantern signals, which means short cuts of cars and learning to give signals in advance, because someone else was relaying them or passing them along to the engineer.

http://www.semp.us/_images/biots/Biot215PhotoC.jpg

This photo show downtown from the northwest.

The tall elevated roadway is an HOV, (high occupancy vehicle) lane, which runs down the middle of IH10…shown under 10 to 15 feet of water.

This is where IH 45, IH10 intersect…as you can see, everyone that stayed in downtown was stuck there, and everyone that made it home couldn’t get back into downtown.

The straight street than runs north and south is Main street…somewhere under all that water is the UP Eureka subdivision.

And this is my side of town, the high side…the south east side was completely flooded.

We had standing water in North yard, over all of the tracks, for three days, and we are r

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Being short of power and pulling trains with anything that will still run is symptomatic of a railroad in its final days. The Milwaukee Road and the Rock Island are two other good examples of this. It made for some colorful lashups on both lines. No two locomotives painted in the same color scheme, lots of smoke, and when you add in the leasers it was a photographer’s dream.

There are some good stories about locomotives getting “lost” at interchange points and warnings not to let new power run through to either railroad. Whether true or not they point to the desperation of the situation.

John Timm

23

Mark Hemphill’s article in Trains on the failure of the SP sets forth the explanation(s) for what went wrong about as well as any periodical can summarize something so complex. I consider the article MWH’s journalistic swansong. The part about scrable was my favorite aspect of the article and had me laughing out loud.

Obviously, the story of the SP’s deterioration is something that would make good reading in the form of a book, and I would like to see a book on it similar to The Men Who Loved Trains. I also would like to hear theories regarding how the Rock’s demise affected the SP–specifically how regulation of the spinoffs affected the SP. I have heard the theory that the SP would have survived and been around today had the it been allowed to receive portions of the Rock. I finally, think the book should conclude with how problems with the SP really affected–negatively–business on the UP during the early years of the merger.

I lived in Illinois very close to the ex-GM&O/Alton/ICG line used by the SP during its final years. Considering it was the SP’s only Chicago access, I was surprised how little traffic the line received. However, the line looked a lot better under SP’s tenure than the ICG’s. Also, I noticed the older power on the line similar to what was described above–I was convinced that if the UP merger took another two years I would have been treated to covered wagons in the black widdow scheme and GS-4s. Had the merger taken three years, I probably would have seen trains pulled by mules . . .

Alas, what a sight that would have been.

Gabe

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Gabe:

I believe SP had trackage or haulage rights on the Santa Fe from KC to Chicago. I saw trains on that route in the early mid 90’s.

I agree with your assessment of Mark Hemphill’s SP article. Perhaps Mark would be the person to write the book.

Until that book is printed, pickup Fred Frailey’s Blue Streak Merchandise.

ed

25

Thanks, I will have to check that out. I have liked what I have read from Mr. Frailey thus far–although I still would rather read an expanded version of Mark’s article.

Gabe

P.S. I took the long way home (Mt. Olive, Illinois) this weekend, and stopped by Newton to take a quick look at the remnants of your line. There was a nice string of CN tubular grain hoppers in what remains of your line. Man, was it a hot day. There were times I had to turn my airconditioning off so my car would not overheat. Sometimes you forget just how much more hot AND HUMID it can be in Southern Illinois as compared to central and northern Indiana.

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Gabe,

Trade ya…

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It was hot and humid down there…with no AC, but somehow we all survived. I was down home this spring and the ROW is pretty much consumed by small trees, grass, weeds, etc. In a few years it will be hard to see it.

It would have been interesting had Indiana Railroad held on to that route. The more I think about it, with grain and ethanol, it might have made it.

ed