Casa Grande, AZ is located on the SP main south of Phoenix. In November of '92 we found a passenger station and SP power in need of some love. Casa Grande in better times:
As a result of declining maintenance on portions of the former SP secondary route through Phoenix, Amtrak moved the city's Amtrak stop to Maricopa, about 30 Miles south of town on the SP main. There's no station structure there, but CZ obs Silver Horizon makes a nice substitute. A neat SP steel water tank remains in place. I learned that SP's milepost distances are calculated from San Francisco where the road was once headquartered.
Just two shots from the Phoenix area in November 2002, the first at Wittmann, AZ (about 35 Miles northwest of Phoenix on the Peavine) and the other at Theba, AZ (about 60 Miles southwest of Phoenix).
I found this old "aerial" drawing depicting 1873 Houston. It shows the Houston & Texas Central tracks in the foreground. The Grand Central Station is only partially shown on the lower right with a passenger car sticking out behind it. This 1894 photo shows Houston Grand Central Station on the right with the banana trees in front of it. Cotton was a big deal back then. The Southern Pacific eventually replaced Grand Central with the structure shown in this photo.
As seen in June 1997 in Grants, NM, I was amazed to see an FP-45 in service in warbonnet colors. Ends up that this unit is now part of the collection at the Western America Railroad Museum in Barstow, CA. A neat sight in Montgomery, AL was C30-7 #8127 as seen in April 1990 on lease to CSX by GE. Note sister unit 8126 coupled behind.
When the Southwest Chief stopped in Barstow in July 2014, our cars were spotted right beside the 95. So it was photo time. My wife and I on the front porch.
A study in F40PH contrasts, with a grimy 344 on the Crescent at Birmingham, AL and a shiny 272 on a Gulf Breeze promotional train at Montgomery, AL. Trivia - 14 months after the October 1989 slide of the 272 was taken, the unit lead the Night Owl in an overspeed crash in Boston.
Some random BN power here. In order, April '87 Rochelle, IL, May '89 Irondale, AL and August '90 East Thomas, AL.
For a time in Minot, a Soo SD60 roamed around. Here's a 2016 view at Soo Tower: This SLSF car looks lost in Montana! A Great Falls, MT contractor had this as a storage trailer (as of 2008):
In the latter '70s, a rapid rise in coal loadings placed demands on the L&N that it scrambled to shoulder. A poor physical plant and a shortage of hoppers and locomotives made a mess of operations. CN power was commonly seen during this era. These two views are from Knoxville in 1978. I like where CN places its bells.
Virginia Scrap Iron & Metal's junkyard in Roanoke, VA was long the home of two Chesapeake & Western Baldwin DS 4-4-660s, rusting away there for many decades, as seen here in August of '83. Amazingly, both have since been saved. The 663 seen here is now owned by Roanoke Chapter NRHS and her sister 662 is now at the Roanoke Transportation Museum. Both are to be cosmetically restored.
Whoa, thanks for the pictures Russell! It's amazing to see what they've accomplished. A job like that requires a whole lot more than naval jelly and a wire wheel. I looked around on the Internet to see if the NRHS is working on the 663, but couldn't find anything. The 663 will require buckets of money that the NRHS is unlikely to have.
I wouldn't call it PSR. Just a response to volume and age. The gensets had been stored LUBO (laid up, bad order) at North Yard in Fort Worth for a couple years before this movement. Once the tax credit that funded them expired, they were only operated until they failed. As that occurred they were parked in turn. The SD70MACs are for the most part still usable. However, with the decreases in traffic that occurred through the last half of 2019, there's less of an incentive to operate locomotives that will require heavy maintenance. As these locomotives age that's just the reality of keeping them around. The decision to park these in particular is magnified by the fact that the number of coal trains continues to decline and these locomotives perform best in that service (personally, I'd like to see them back in service and assigned to all heavy unit trains). Another issue is that EMD locomotives do not have GE's Trip Optimizer installed, which is a quasi-auto pilot system intended to achieve maximum fuel conservation. If you see more GEs on the point of BNSF coal trains, I'd suspect this is the reason.
Ryan is correct I believe. Plus the fact those older MAC's would cost a fortine to install PTC isn't helping their cause either. Man will those things pull.
