Does anyone have information about the GN and WP at Bieber? If so, I'd like to know who owned the depot? (Joint agency?) Or did they each have their own? Also, how were the train orders handled? By both RR dispatchers? Or? Boxcab E50
IIRC the depot was GN's. GN handled their train orders going north and WP south. Now there may have been a clerk for WP there to take care of that but a clerk for the GN could copy WP train orders over the phone and give them to the WP crews. The GN also had a round house there IIRC and yard crews early on. I'll have to dig out a couple of my WP books to make sure though. Greg
In th Great Northern book by Wood,(the big expensive one from Pacific Fast Mail), theres a pic in there of the station in early BN times and all there is on it is a "BN" sign and the station name. I remember seeing a pic somewhere, where the mainline is in the middle, WP's siding on the right, and BN on the left, so they could interchange trains, and the station is on the BN side of the tracks.
Thanks, guys. It sounds as if my friend was correct in what he was thinking. That a GN operator was the one copying both GN, and WP orders. Boxcab E50
My understanding is that Nubieber wasn't supposed to happen at all. WP and GN initially agreed to meet at Lookout Junction, but the meeting point got moved south to Nubieber when WP's construction budget could not be stretch quite far enough. A friend of mine has copies of the plans and agreements for what might have been at Lookout Junction. WP did have trackage rights on the GN main from Bieber north to Lookout Junction and then over the Hambone branch to the "official" interchange point with the McCloud River Railroad. WP gave these rights up without ever using them, as GN had hired the McCloud to operate the Hambone-Lookout line as their agent. In the later part of the 1970's the WP marketing and economics department spent a disproportionately large percentage of their time working on studies for bringing diatomaceous earth from the Burney area destined for points on the eastern part of the WP system, but every study concluded that the rate structures in place at the time made any such movements uneconomical- the McCloud would get paid once for moving the car from Burney to Hambone, then get paid again for moving the car from Hambone to Lookout, and GN would also collect a short haul rate on top of that for the Hambone-Lookout Junction-Bieber movement. The end result was that somewhere around 40% of the total costs of moving the car involved getting it over just the first 100 miles, and the WP could not find a profitable way to handle the business beyond there. Jeff Moore Elko, NV
Oh how things have changed since the GN days. WP gone. The McCloud chopped down to almost nothing... :tb-sad: Boxcab E50
