It has been a long time since anything has been said about this project. IIRC, it would enter the mountain at Hilgard or thereabouts and the other end be about Camp. Last I remember hearing is that the UP decided it would be cheaper to both build and operate a 2MT CTC line on the current alignment. I think that it would also be easier to go down the Snake than to build that tunnel.
Whereabouts is Camp Oregon? Is it down on the Umatilla River portion of the line?
Even if that tunnel project required 20+ miles worth of tunnelling, isn’t that still cheaper than 100+ miles of new canyon-bottom trackage via Hell’s Canyon from Huntington to Lewiston? I suspect such a line would suffer the same problems as UP’s nee-WP’s Feather River route.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to see such a line built in this day and age, eco-litigation notwithstanding. UP could then terminate all their grain trains in Lewiston, and free up oodles of capacity over the Blue’s and through the Gorge.
From what I recall, CTC or PRN mentioned UP was looking at a 12 mile tunnel from Hilgard to Camp, or a 15 mile tunnel from Hilgard to Duncan. Hasn’t a second line or a long tunnel been rendered unnecessary by DPU’s ?
How much of the Feather River Route is through difficult terrain ? All of the way between Oroville and Portolla, or just part of that ?
Murph, up here the Fraser River itself is only a problem for rail lines in the coastal plain. In the mountains the lines don’t get washed out, they just have to deal with slides from above.
See this URL – resize the map to 1:50,000. It is centered on Camp.
http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=45.48241&lon=-118.27538&datum=nad27&u=4&layer=DRG&size=l&s=100
Also know as “The Knuckel Buster”. About 300 or 400 feet lower than Hilgard.
I didn’t say cheaper. I said easier. And the alignment would go from North Powder to Lewston down the Powder to the Snake (via Halfway) and then Nort
My thoughts were that the line between Huntington and North Powder is not exactly a cakewalk either, so why not head straight north from Huntington rather than tackling the Baker City portion, then doubling back southeast to the Snake, then heading north?
And if that section from Huntington to La Grande isn’t so bad for grain trains, why not just utilize the Grande Ronde drainage heading northeast from La Grande to Lewiston to avoid the Blues? It’d be both shorter than using the Powder River to Snake River alignment, and be all downhill from La Grande to Lewiston. Plus you don’t have to go through such an environmentally sensitive area as Hell’s Canyon NRA.
PS to Murphy - apologies for hijacking the thread, but I don’t really want to start a new thread on this sidebar, unless absolutely necessary!
Back to the WP/SP…
UP used to have a line from Twin Falls ID south to Wells NV. I suppose it connected with the Nevada Northern, but also interchanged with SP and WP as it crossed those lines.
Who was the primary interchange partner for UP on this line, WP or SP?
It did not interchange with Nevada Northern (look at your map; didn’t even get close). Business on the line was very little and was primarily with SP, principally traffic between western Idaho and California. This is not much of a lane even today; U.S. 93 has very low truck traffic counts.
S. Hadid
Sorry, I don’t have a rail map of Neveda!
You’ll see no complaints from me. There’s just so many posts about global warming that a guy can read, before he wishes someone would talk about trains.[;)]
Besides, to us flatlanders, reading about mountain railroads is a bonus.[:)]
Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m sure there’s a parallel universe out there where the Milwaukee Northwestern extended it’s Elk River branch south through Hell’s Canyon to Winnemucca to connect with the Western Central Pacific, then on south to it’s subsidiary the Tonopah, Tidewater & Santa Fe.[8D]
Conrail became quite successful after Stanley Crane shifted most of the western PRR traffic onto NYC lines. It’s unfortunate we don’t have many NYC fans on this forum.
It seems like Perlman is given rave reviews by writers for whatever he did with WP. However, it sounds like, if there wasn’t a lot he could have done with WP during regulation, what he did do was perhaps no different or better than anyone else would have. Is some of that praise given, simply because he managed to go on railroading after PC? I note, also, that Saunders didn’t go on railroading, and is usually cast as the goat of PC.
[quote user=“1435mm”]
Ed:
There’s no question about it – the best-located route in the West is the Sunset Route and in the Official Territory it is the NYC.
Note I said “best located” not “best engineered.” Almost all of the main lines in operation today were engineered just fine, but not all of them are well-located. There is a substantial difference between the two that is often conflated.
Railway location and alignment is a two-task process. The secondary task is the alignment, the best solution to a fixed and given problem, e.g., “build a railroad connecting San Francisco and Salt Lake City, with a ruling gradient of 1.0%, running times of secondary importance, circuity not too excessive, high construction costs permissable.” This is a technical process of examining a location chosen by a client and delivering the best balance between capital costs and operating costs for the client’s capital budget and operating cost expectations. The primary task is location, a high-level decision-making process that analyzes economic geography, geographic conditions, and broad trends, and selects a location that has the highest potential for return on investment. Put another way, alignment is the process of determining the costs; location is the process of knowing what those costs mean.
The Western Pacific is well-aligned for its second-choice location but the difference between first and second choice location in this case is profound. There’s nothing that could have been done significantly better with its engineers’ solution to the location, given the cost of construction at that time and the construction budget. It’s just that the location wasn’t very good to begin with. But the client had already chosen the location – San Francisco to Salt Lake City – and couldn’t be discouraged from his decision. The CP had already taken the better alignment and had bui
The short answer is that UP-SP (former Central Pacific) is the superior location in the Central Corridor. It has been since it was built, and will remain so in the forseeable future. Central Pacific took first choice and Western Pacific second choice of the feasible routes. In this particular case there was a large difference in quality between first and second choice (as opposed to, say, C&NW vs. CB&Q between Chicago and Council Bluffs).
It is as you suggest worthwhile to compare the quality of location of the original UP line to Promontory to the original CP line to Promontory. The most basic question is if both occupied the best location that was available in the Central Corridor, to which the answer is yes. (Had
Given the two, different rail lines, each with it’s own unique charactoristics, how does that effect the kind of traffic UP sends over the lines? Or does it?
It does affect traffic.
There are three different segments west of Ogden to consider; Ogden-Wells either via SP over the lake, the Lucin Cutoff, and Montello Hill, or WP via Salt Lake City, Wendover, Silver Zone Pass, and Flowery Lake Tunnel; Wells-Winnemucca via the Paired Track (directional SP-WP); and Winnemucca-Roseville either via the WP via Portola, Keddie, Oroville and the Feather River Canyon, or SP via Reno and Donner Pass.
Ogden-Wells via SP encounters a 1.4% ruling grade on both sides of the Pequop Mountains. Ogden Wells via WP encounters ~70 miles of 1.0% ruling grade westward, has to fight through the congestion of Salt Lake City and the junction with the Lynndyl and Provo Subdivisions where they merge in at Smelter and Grant Tower, respectively, and is considerably longer. Accordingly the bulk trains and non-priority trains are routed via the WP and the intermodal via the SP. The WP is length restricted as it’s essentially a 6,000’ siding railroad.
Wells-Winnemucca is joint directional running. There are no major grades, clearance issues, or significant speed differentials between the two tracks.
Winnemucca-Roseville via WP encounters ~75 miles of 25 mph (curve limited) in the canyon, insufficient sidings, short sidings, and more frequent bad weather issues than Donner Pass. It’s also much longer than Donner Pass. But because it is 1.0% ruling grade eastward and virtually all descending westward, and cleared for hi-cube double stacks, the bulk trains (mostly grain) and double-stack traffic go via the WP. The SP has 2.4% eastward and 1.9% westward but is much shorter, faster, and doesn’t have the WP’s constraints of short sidings and not enough of them – in fact, a great deal of Donner is double track or 2MT CTC. So the priority manifest traffic and autorack traffic tends to go via Donner.
S. Hadid
Mr. Hadid:
Clarify, if you will, your statement of Rio Grande largely being abandoned today, if not for the ICC regulation.
In a previous rather lengthy discussion of Rio Grande, you indicated it is mineral rich. Are you talking about certain segments (would be abandoned such as Tennessee Pass)?
ed
That’s interesting. Isn’t Donner Pass the one with all the snow sheds and rotary plows? By more frequent bad weather issues, do you mean snow problems on WP?
There are very few snowsheds remaining on Donner and the rotaries go YEARS without turning a wheel.
I am endlessly impressed how myth and romance are so more powerful than fact and reason. Donner’s snowfall issues are vastly overblown by the railfan literature whereas the Feather River Canyon’s rockslides, mudslides, and washout issues have merited hardly a glance, and the former is of no big importance most of the time while the latter can be a big problem quite a lot of the time.
95% of the railfan literature is worth only its value as fireplace fuel.
S. Hadid
OH!!! How true. Yet without the “fan literature” we would all be so ignorant of our item of interest