Nostalgia & History > While they rebuilt the ROCK

The good news was that the entire Golden State Route was getting a complete make-over, stem to stern. The bad news was that the good old Rock Island as we knew it was gone forever. Yeah, yeahhh… survival of the fittest, and all that. But nature’s famous law sure didn’t soothe the heart of any fan of the Mighty Fine Line. It was some little consolation that it was the Rock Island’s traditional partner, the Southern Pacific who took control of operations through its subsidiary Cotton Belt. We could pretend that a tiny bit of the Rock Island was still alive, somewhere down deep.

During the early 1980s several millions of SP/Cotton Belt dollars were poured into the massive rehabilitation. Huge chunks of the old mainline were necessarily out of service during this complete rebuilding project. This meant that the Cotton Belt had to detour traffic over its good neighbor Santa Fe for extended periods of time.

Before it was all said & done the Cotton Belt detoured a colossal amount of tonnage over the Santa Fe between Kansas City & Hutchinson, KS. It was a sort of bonanza for us KS Gang railfans, but not much solace for sentimental Rock Island fan that resided in all of us. During this period we concentrated quite a bit of our railfanning efforts on catching these detours. When we checked at the Emporia wire office to procure a line-up, we got in the habit of looking for any SSW detours first.

Let’s go back 35 years to a warm, hazy-bright day in the spring of 1981 and take a peek at what was going on in Emporia:

1. SP 7666 is eastbound with ‘Cotton Belt’ train 01 LAKCP-08, detouring over the Santa Fe main line. The train has just swapped its Middle Division engineer/pilot for one from the Eastern Division. It is pulling ahead to change conductor-pilots next, then will highball for Kansas City.
Photo taken in Emporia, KS on April 11, 1981.

Long live the Rock!
Lance Garrels
santafe199



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/30/22 04:38 by santafe199.

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SWEET! !!!

Very NICE!!

Larry

     Seems hard to believe it was 35 years ago, seems more like a few months when those shiney GP/40-2s and others were coming through Liberal, Ks.

When they were new, those SP/SSW EMD's with high mounted horns, lazy L windshields, and Gyralites were some of the best looking diesels ever.   BSB

It should be noted that when SP and Santa Fe entered their very first merger talks in 1980 there were those in Santa Fe upper management who believed SP was wasting money and resources rebuilding the ex-RI Golden State Route.  Their reasoning was simple:  if SP and Santa Fe merge the GSR is redundent trackage.  But SP Chairman Ben Biaggini never bought into that type of thinking it and it's a good thing he didn't.  Biaggini could be accused of many "misdeeds" while at SP but the GSR was a line he had wanted to get his hands on since the mid 1970's when it was clear running times on the RI were becoming longer and Tucumcari interchange car counts were sinking.  Even Rob Krebs said SP's purchase of the GSR for $57 million was "the steal of the century".  There might not be any other ex-RI line considered more important today...

Nice photo Lance!


Allen


 



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/16 20:04 by bradleymckay.

Your slide scans really pop out!

Excellent photo and scan !

Gary

That's a great narrative and photo Lance! I was in my junior year in high school in 1981 and lived (and still live) in Ohio and had never gotten to the Rock when it was still alive. But I have been to Emporia during the flying crew changes in the Santa Fe years in the late 80's. That was impressive enough, but this would have been a blast to see. 

I piloted several of those during a bad washout & derailment one year. I got on at Newton, and took them to Emporia. We stopped at Florence each trip to change SSW crews, who were being vanned back & forth from Herington, KS.

Posted from Android



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/16 13:42 by LocoPilot750.

LocoPilot750 Wrote:
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> I piloted several of those during a bad washout &
> derailment one year. I got on at Newton, and took
> them to Emporia. We stopped at Florence each trip
> to change SSW crews, who were being vanned back &
> forth from Herington, KS.
>
> Posted from Android
And, skimming through the old time books, had a few out of Newton with an all AT&SF crew too, not sure how they decided on that, instead of using pilots. Might have been rested crew shortages at Herrington.

Not much Perishable traffic on the LAKCP, mostly loose car loads