Railroaders' Nostalgia > feeling sheepish?

After my little tale about handling livestock at Winslow, I offered to relate how the Santa Fe handled train loads of sheep in the Spring and Fall between Northern and Southern Arizona. In the pleasant summers in the high country of Northern Arizona, shepherds tended their flocks every summer, with thousands of sheep wandering across the plateaus and thru the scrub forests. Santa Fe actually supplied water for some of these herds, hauling tank cars of water to obscure sidings on the Grand Canyon branch and along the main line. A shepherd could order a car of water, and it would be delivered in a few days. Most of the tank cars were ten thousand gallon cars and the charge was usually about $65.00 per car. It was not a major revenue source for John Santa Fe!

Sometime in early October, they would begin to move their sheep towards Williams and Ashfork. The several hundred livestock cars stored in Northern Arizona would be prepared by the section crews by scraping out the bedding sand and replacing it with fresh sand. Now the shepherds preferred double deck cars instead of single deck, but there weren't enough doubles, so single deck cars would be substituted on a two for one basis.

I would usually volunteer to wander over to Williams when the sheep trains were being loaded, to coordinate the operation with the chief train dispatcher and the crews. The first crew would run from Winslow about 600am on duty, pick up 60 stock cars, and bring them to Williams. The stock pens were located on the Grand Canyon branch North of town. By 10am or so, the first cars would be ready for loading. The shepherds would coerce the sheep onto the ramp and into the cars and count them. When two cars had been loaded, the crew would respot two more empties, and on and on it went. It seemed to take about three or four hours to load 60 cars. The ideal was to load all 60 or so cars, and still have time left on the crew's hours of service to haul the train to Ashfork and turn it over to a Phoenix line crew. At Ashfork, the Winslow crew would take two engines and hopefully head back to Williams to spot cars for the next days loading. If the crew did not have time, they would tie up at Ashfork and be called on their rest the next day to run to Williams and load sheep.

This would continue for two or three days, running two or even three trains of sheep down the "Peavine" to Phoenix. The sheep would be unloaded either on the Santa Fe's McMicken spur Northwest of Phoenix, or unloaded on the SP around Picacho. The sheep would then graze their way thru the fallow fields in the warm winter around Phoenix, and then catch a train back to Williams or Ashfork in the spring.

If a trainload of sheep were loaded at 300pm on Tuesday, they had to be unloaded before 300am Thursday morning or heavy fines could be assessed, so it was necessary to closely watch the movement of the trains. Some shepherds did not always ship in trainloads so there were occasional movements of 10 to 20 carloads of sheep which were handled on the regular Phoenix trains,
The waybills for this business always had cryptic notes such as "last loaded 10a Oct 20 Wms, Az. crj" to assist in observing the feed water and rest issues. One thing that could not happen was for the sheep to run out their time in downtown Phoenix on the interchange track - where in the heck would you unload 4000 sheep in down town Phoenix?

Fortunately, sheep are somewhat less messy than cattle - the major issue in handling the sheep by rail was the dust - 4000 sheep can kick up a lot of dust. Wearing old clothing was highly recommended. By 1970 or so, the livestock trade evaporated and made running a railroad in the high country of Northern Arizona much simpler.

TIOGA PASS

I'm strictly curious, where were the major loading points for sheep on the Grand Canyon branch? I recall that there's still pens at Quivero, Valle, Anita, and Willaha.

The only places I ever saw sheep loading occur were at Williams and at Ash Fork.


Norm

Thanks for sharing the follow up story. Good stuff! Hmmm... Steak, or Lamb Chops for dinner?

Leg, roasted:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/silence-of-the-leg-o-lamb-recipe/index.html

or this:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/bobby-flay/roasted-leg-of-lamb-recipe/index.html

John Gezelius
Tustin, CA