Losing Color: The Last Of the Grande Engines

Losing color is a bad thing. Ask any doctor and they'll tell you that seeing someone as white as a ghost is bad news. Being a conservative, I shy away from liberal buzzwords like "diversity," but diversity is exactly what we continue to lose in American railroading.

According to ND Holmes of DRGW.net, the last Denver and Rio Grande Western engine with it's original, non UP/SP road number, an SD40 T-2 unit numbered DRGW 5371, is likely going to be patched to a UP road number this month. This will mark the last of the all-Grande, non-Armour yellow-tainted units to pass into history.

5371's sister unit SD40T-2 stands on the ready line at Denver's North Yard on a hot summer day in 1997. Photo (c) 1997 by the author.

Even though the unit is currently based in Utah, the significance of this for Colorado is that it is the last of the locomotives that called Colorado and Utah "home." With it's passing, American railroading will become much less colorful.

The Rio Grande was the last surviving railroad born in Denver. After buying up a larger but cash-strapped Southern Pacific in 1988, Rio Grande under the SP flag fell to the Union Pacific mega-corporation in 1996. Denver-based billionaire Phillip Anschutz sold out to the UP, which was responding to the Burlington Northern merging with the Santa Fe in 1995. This was the opposite direction of a mid-80's merger that was denied by the Interstate Commerce Commission between the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe. The Burlington Northern would likely have been bought out by the Union Pacific, but the resulting chain of mergers would have created a monopoly of railroads in too many cities. Before the ICC denied the merger, however, the SP and SF planned to consolidate to one paint scheme of red and yellow, nicknamed Kodachrome after the film packaging of the same color combination. They were painted with letters SP or SF pre-positioned on the engines so that once the merger was official, they could paint the other two beside them to form SPSF. After the denial, SPSF was jokingly referred to "Shouldn't Paint So Fast."




Photos from Wikipedia

After the merger of SP and UP in 1996, the remaining Class 1 (large, main line) roads shrank from five to four with the split-up of the eastern road Conrail. Today, there are two major Class 1 railroads in the east, CSX and Norfolk Southern, and two railroads in the west, the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Over 20 years ago in the mid-80's, there were more than 30 Class 1 railroads. Each region of the country had it's own unique splash of color. Santa Fe warbonnets and bluebonnets plied the rails along with Southern Pacific black widows and Kodachromes and, in the east, Chessie's yellow and orange. Each locomotive livery was a source of corporate pride and lended itself to a colorful representation in railroad photography.

Today, unless you like BNSF orange, UP yellow, CSX grey or NS black, you're out of luck. A few regional railroads and a smattering of shortlines, which have gone through their own mergers offer the only reprieve from the big four, unless you count Amtrak, which is the eventual destiny of all railroads if these mergers continue.

Whenever a corporation merges, it loses unique and colorful aspects of their operation, sometimes with detrimental effects. For example, when UP took over SP's operations in 1997, California, Texas and numerous other western states suffered under a tremendous gridlock. SP's method of operations was completely incompatible with the UP's method and when UP attempted to apply it's method to the SP system, traffic ground to a crawl with trains on sidings abandoned by crews that had spent 12 hours waiting to get into a railroad yard. If trains were it's circulatory system, UP was literally having a heart attack. It's recovery from this ordeal took years. and not a few shippers were lost to other transportation companies, mostly over-the-road trucking.

Sometimes, more isn't always better. Sometimes more is just more. While the trend of business is to merge and become more powerful, the ability of clients to utilize competition to their advantage will dwindle. Local industries and businesses will suffer rising costs, passing them on in one form or another to the consumer. Likewise, local uniqueness and color will fade to globalization.

This is the way of things, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

Argentine Central

Just found these pictures of the Argentine Central Railway from the Colorado State archives website. It was the railroad that joined up with the Georgetown Loop. It was a tourist railway for the most part that ran up to the top of Mt. McClellan, but never on Sundays. It was owned by a pastor and because he didn't want trains running over his railroad on the "Lord's Day," he took an enormous hit each week in revenue during the tourist season. As a result, the railway folded in a few years but kept opening under other names. There were some mining ventures, but the rails were eventually torn up by the 1920's in the places where nature didn't already remove the presence of a railroad.

Today, a jeep trail leads almost all the way up. To track it further, look up Tracking Ghost Railroads in Colorado by Robert Ormes.

Telegram Era Ends

According to this report from the AP, Western Union, the last operator providing telegram service has discontinued it's communications operations after 150 years of service. Samuel Morse discovered the technology and used it to send a simple message in the code that would later be given his name, "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?" Even Morse understood that God was the creator of the laws around electromagnetism, and that he had merely harnessed it.

This is a technology that even into the 1970's found it's use in railroad communications. Speed and accuracy were the two qualities required for any agent manning a telegraph key. A mistake or delay in the transmission could be deadly. Train orders were tapped and clicked "down the line" to station agents to give to the engineer, sometimes "hooped up" to them on the fly. Interestingly, radio broadcasters today will talk to stations and use the same phrase to alert their agents "down the line."

In public use, telegrams were used to send all sorts of messages long distance. The senders would pay per word sent to advise of deaths, births, and emergencies. It was the cheapest way to send word quickly.

After more than ten years of the growing popularity of e-mail, the concept of paying per word has been lost in our information age. It is just as cheap to send a 5,000 word e-mail to everyone you know as it is to send a few words to a single person. It is easy--some would say too easy--to let everyone know the details of your life. Today's teens only know of Western Union as "the fastest way to send money." Some may not even know what a telegram was, let alone what it looked like or how they worked.

Our culture is changing. Even conventional radio is being phased out of certain portions of communications, like television and even car...radio. Sirius-ly. Eventually, satellite communications will replace much of what we thought radio had taken forever. One wonders what this bodes for the future of railroads.

BNSF C44-9W unit #5007 is southbound with a manifest train south of Colorado Springs at 1:40 PM on January 28th, 2006.

Colorado Reconsiders Funding the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad

Colorado is reconsidering funding the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad (CATS) line that runs from Antonito, Colorado to Chama, New Mexico during the summer and fall. Until now, Colorado has failed to offer funding to the line for two years, even though it has joint ownership with New Mexico. My knowledge of the nuances in legislative process is pretty slight, but I believe we are not remotely close to actually seeing any money for this historic railroad, despite announcements by both state's governors.

Shaky funding arrangements, which Colorado has failed to resolve, is partly why several management corporations have flown the coup. I'm not impressed by my own state's dealings with this. Until Colorado and New Mexico, as joint owners, work out a permanent solution to maintaining this railroad, we will jeopardize the future of this historic and scenic railroad. The states should either put up the money or get out of the way and let it be run privately.

This blog is just starting up, but in the meantime, I thought I'd point you to the Colorado Online Scanner (scroll down to the bottom to find Railroads).

http://www.scancolorado.com/onlinescanner.htm