My pal Tom Carver--the guy who just authored that fantastic book on the Alco Century series of locomotives that just hit the market--disrupted my life one evening when I visited his home in the Interbay neighborhood of Seattle and laid it on me.
Tom was working as a short-haul truck driver, making a couple of trips a week between Seattle and Spokane. And Tom, being a railfan, couldn't help but keep his eyes out trackside when he was on the road.
His big news one day in the late summer of 1980: Burlington Northern was using F-units--multiple F-units in a big power set--on the Coulee City branch west from Spokane. BN had always assigned F7s and F9's out of Yardley in Spokane, largely assigned to helper service on Marias Pass to the east. But with F45s recently assigned to those duties, they became more popular to use on a few of the long-distance local jobs from there: Up to Kettle Falls and over to Republic on the Canadian Border, south on the P&L down to Moscow, Pullman and Lewiston, and west across the wheatfields to Coulee City.
And Tom had photos to prove it!
Well, that completely messed with my mind--BN's use of F-units in the Seattle area were starting to wind down, and F-units on branchlines hauling boxcars of wheat. . . let's go!
I made at least a half-dozen trips over the mountain to chase those damned F-units, almost down to their final days when the last one went into storage in early 1982. It was always with a variety of fellow photographers, and it always was a great time.
Here's one good memory, from my third trip on August 15, 1981. Engineer Jerry Kohliber leans out the cab window of F9 #808 and gives us a big smile as he takes a couple more notches on the throttle of three F9's and a GP7 not far east of Coulee City near the US 2 grade crossing at Cement Siding.
In four decades of retrenchment of railroads in Eastern Washington, amazing the Coulee City branch still survives--eventually bought by the state and operated even today under a contract operator.
No F units, though. But still a good time.