Guest post by Blair Kooistra.
Occasionally, the trap door will open and gravity pulls me into the big bin of slides hearkening back to the earliest days of railroading. . .at least my life of railroading.
It's the fall of 1980, and Burlington Northern is moving grain to market off the branchlines in Eastern Washington. The network of light rail, minimal ballast, and small grain elevators has been steadily reduced through abandonment; certainly the opening of the Snake River for grain barge traffic hasn't helped the plight of the railroad.
But business still thrives during harvest season on the 108.8 mile former Northern Pacific branchline from Cheney to Coulee City--the railroad calls it the 8th Subdivision of the Spokane Division, but the railroaders colloquially call it the "CW Branch".
A small band of happy warriors with cameras have been chasing the local all day, hitting the road in the very small hours of the day on the hope of intercepting it somewhere on its westward journey to Coulee City. Eyes peeled in the dark, we visited each little grain elevator town, looking for the train--not at Coulee City--so we pressed east, finally finding it at Almira. Before too long, the crew arrived in a van provided by the motel in Coulee City which held the railroad's lodging and transportation contract. Before dawn, they were on their way back west.
The attraction to us, moreso than the nature of branchline railroading, was the use of streamlined EMD F-unit power on this train. The F's had been bumped earlier in the year from the usual assignment at their Spokane mechanical base on the Marias Pass helpers, so they trickled down to branchline service, usually on the CW job as well as the "Highball" from Spokane to Pullman and Lewiston.
After spotting empty 40' boxcars at Coulee City and pulling the loads, they were back eastbound towards home. Starting with 15 loads, 16 more were grabbed at Hartline. . By the time the train rattled up Corbett Draw east of Almira, 31 cars were in tow, wearing a delightful mix of paint schemes, current and obsolete: BN, Burlington, Great Northern--curiously, no Northern Pacific cars with the giant NP initials and monad logo.
Looking back at this from 46 years in the future, I realize now how perfect my timing was to get there when I did. The 40 foot boxcar as a vehicle for wheat haulage had just a few years left before total replacement by 100-ton covered hoppers. Those F-units--and geeps--on the head end--were living on borrowed time as well. Less than two years later, the F-units were stricken from the roster. Some of the geeps lingered on another 15 or so years.
What a wonderful time in railroading this still was--streamlined diesels, boxcar grain with friction-bearing trucks, and a light-railed branchine with minimal ballast. The rail joints banged and clattered as the train passed by. And of course there was a caboose on the rear. An every day scene back then. How everyday? I didn't even photograph the caboose!
