Railroaders' Nostalgia > Some Enchanted Evening [redux]

Almost 5 years ago [ http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,2568130,2568130#msg-2568130 ] I posted the image below accompanied by a short story. In between then & now I’ve acquired much better scanning & photo-editing capability. Here is that same photo, with a reworked and expanded storyline. The photo isn’t perfect, but it’s much sharper with a lot better color. Enjoy:

During my time with the Santa Fe catching a lite engine move was always an experience out of the ordinary. I loved catching one, because Santa Fe would let them run at 70 MPH if dynamic brakes were operable. A lite engine move usually meant that excess power on one end of the road was needed at the other. And these moves would generally get good handling by the dispatchers. Of course, there were a few rascally hogheads who would honor that 70 MPH caveat in, shall we say: the breech rather than the observance! At any rate, working a lite engine move would likely mean a short trip time-wise for a crew lucky enough to catch one.

Part of the enchantment in lite engine moves is how quickly they could accelerate from a dead stop, and get to 70 MPH. It didn’t matter if you were on board, or on the ground watching in awe as one departed. I remember a trip one afternoon as the head brakeman working some heavy Argentine-bound train out of Arkansas City, KS (probably a 563). We had 2 little 6300 Class U-23-Bs for power, and one of them was giving us fits. We were certainly no ball of fire and at Hackney, just out of Ark City we got ran around by a hotter 581 pig train. Later on we were stopped at the east end of 2 main tracks at El Dorado, KS to get ran around again. Listening to previous radio chatter we knew it was a lite engine move out of Wellington that would be clipping us. I had been around long enough to know that sometimes you had to ‘make your own breaks’. I got the idea that maybe we could get a unit off the lite engine move that was going to run around us. My engineer, J. A. ‘Jim’ Stubenhofer was an unassuming, unimposing type. In short he was a gentleman of the 1st class. He would never think of trying to “swipe” a unit off of someone else’s train, unless it was absolutely necessary. Leave that kind of scheming up to his head brakeman, otherwise known as yours truly.

When I approached Jim with my plan his mild mannerism responded with: “Sure! Go ahead and give ‘em a call.” I hadn’t counted on doing the actual calling. But I was already in it, so I plunged forward and got into radio contact with the DS to present my idea. He ran it past the SFe Power Bureau gods and got an ‘OK’. When the time came the transfer actually came off very quickly. The time it took those lite engines to [1] stop next to us, [2] cut their lead unit off with our help, [3] run it in on top of our train and [4] get their new lead unit set up, air tested & [5] ready to depart was less than 10 minutes. I remember still being on the ground when that engineer “skinned ‘em back”. If memory serves the hogger was W. J. Scrap Iron Jack Richardson sitting at the throttle. When he got his clear signal he must have slammed the throttle into 8. ALL of the units in his consist immediately belched black exhaust, and the whole mass lurched forward under an astonishing & ever increasing rate of acceleration! In less than a minute they were down the track & out of sight around the first corner. To this day it remains one of the most impressive and yes, enchanting train service episodes I ever participated in…

1. AT&SF 6398 points “train” 9503 BI-1, aka lite engines. This mass of unharnessed horsepower is stopped for a crew change at Emporia, KS on November 29, 1980. A tiny trace of a recently enchanting sunset can be seen to the left of the lead unit.

Thanks for looking again!
Lance Garrels
santafe199



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/16 16:54 by santafe199.

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Lance,

Did you notice any appreciable difference in riding quality with the 6300 class engines that had the modern FB style truck or the old AAR B trucks that were traded in off the U-25s?  We never saw them on the Coast Lines while I was working and always wondered.

WP-M2051 Wrote: > ... Did you notice any appreciable difference in riding quality...
As I recall the 6350 Class boats rode marginally better than the old 6300 potato wagons, but the difference was nothing to write home about. Neither one was near as bad as the worst unit I ever rode in. And that was the LMX B-39-8s that BN had leased in the early days of Montana Rail Link. There were SO many things I hated about those gut-jarring pieces of crap that it's easier to list the one (1) thing I DID like about them which was: "Quittin' time" when you could climb down off one of those gut-jarring pieces of crap...

Lance/199



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/16 16:53 by santafe199.

All junk, then, I guess.  Those 7980s were terrible too...

WP-M2051 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Lance,
>
> Did you notice any appreciable difference in
> riding quality with the 6300 class engines that
> had the modern FB style truck or the old AAR B
> trucks that were traded in off the U-25s?  We
> never saw them on the Coast Lines while I was
> working and always wondered.
Moving around slow, I do remember the old style trucks seemed to transmit more of the wheel-rail contact and noise into the cab. Rail joints, gaps, frogs etc. On track irregularities, they would give you a jolt and a little bounceing. They had more of a rigid feel as slow speeds. It kind of went away out on the road, but you could still tell you were riding on steel springs, more than big rubber blocks. I liked them on the locals, because they still had the clasp, cast iron brake shoes, and below ten mph or so, they had more brakeing effort then comp shoes, and you had to lay down a little sand sometimes, if rail conditions were bad, because they were more likely to slide a little just as they came to a stop. If you had one in the consist, as you were coming to a stop, you could hear the brakes squealing, and feel the unit bucking against the rest of the engines that had comp shoes. Below about ten mph down to a stop, the units of any type with cast iron shoes were almost too effective, at the same speed where comp shoes were actually loosing effectiveness down to the actual stop.

OutStanding Image

Posted from iPhone

Excellent shot, Lance!

Randy Lundgren