Big Bend Railroad History

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

CBRW Near Connell

Courtesy of Blair Kooistra.

Blair says:
"I had shortlines on my mind when I took off for Eastern Washington a week ago--there are enough of them to keep one busy for a month, at least. But time was limited and near the top of the list was Nick Temple's Columbia Basin Railroad, operating former BN (Northern Pacific) and Milwaukee Road lines out of the Warden area, connected to the outside world via a BNSF connection at Connell.
Connell lies in the bottom of a coulee, or canyon, and northbound BNSF mainline trains have a tough .8% go of it on a series of several climbs ultimately to just outside of Cheney before the drop into Spokane.

"Columbia Basin has its own mountain to surmount--a little bit steeper, and certainly much shorter, but given the railroad's fleet of SD9 and GP7 and 9 locomotives on trains approaching 10,000 tons off the BNSF--well, it's a spectacle that should be plastered all over the rail magazines that people allegedly still read. Simply put: there's no place in North America where so many old EMD's gang up to hoist tonnage up a steep grade.
So Columbia Basin was near the top of the list--and it didn't disappoint. Monday trains are supposedly the heaviest, and the railroad MU'ed five SD9s and one ex-ATSF GP7 to bring a 96 car train back from the BNSF.

"The climb out of Connell is a ten-mile grade of a ruling 1.0%; included are several 7 and 8 degree curves, including one horseshoe. Much of the railroad climbing the hill out of Connell is not readily visible without driving along farmer's fields or a good hike; I put my drone up in the air to record this view of the northbound train moving through one S-curve and heading into the horseshoe curve. Pity I didn't make a recording. At 12 miles per hour, the show lasted a good 15 minutes and was a wonderful memory of days of early-generation EMD's up against it."