Railroaders' Nostalgia > "We WANT the trench!"

The battle over the Reno trench is an epic story going back in history when there was a proposal back in the steam era to elevate Southern Pacific through the city. It was soon disparaged as a "Chinese Wall" that would divide the city and fell forgotten into the newspaper archives.

To be fair train traffic through the city had dropped considerably from my college days there in the 60s when the Espee ran fleets of refrigerator trains and manifests, light helpers through the casino district. After we acquired and upgraded the Western Pacific to the north, I heard one internal estimate that traffic on the SP Overland route dropped to as few as six trains a day. Reno had apparently grown complacent with their historic neighbor.


The proposed Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger reignited city dreams of a trainless city. First the city threatened to oppose the merger unless we moved the tracks out of town. When the blackmail attempt failed planners revisited the Chinese Wall briefly then turned their attention to I-80, proposing to put the railroad in the freeway median. A serious look at that showed the grades and costs made the idea unworkable. The Reno newspapers, my former employer, began crusade to force a solution. Endless reports of how swollen train traffic would cut the city in two began with ominous stories of how fire trucks and ambulances would be blocked with people dying on the other side of the tracks. One councilwoman kept talking about how a derailed train could fall into the Truckee River and poison the city's water supply. The newspaper even published a "death map" of the downtown area showing how a wreck could ravage the casino district.

As a spokesman for Union Pacific I flailed away at the "what ifs" and tried to stop the exaggerated numbers of how many trains the merger would bring. Finally The Surface Transportation Board put a cap on the number of trains we could run through Reno until we reached an agreement with the city. The number was 14.3 trains a day. Passenger trains didn't count. (Freight trains bad, passenger trains good.)

Former SP Exec Bob Starzel turned to me one day and told me to quit working so hard on fighting the press. "We want the trench," he reminded me. (But we wanted the city to pay for it.) Thanks to the amazing work by Bill Wimmer and Tom Ogee in our engineering department they negotiated a very favorable plan with the city for a trench and a memorandum of understanding was signed. The city would finance the construction; the railroad would supply the track materials and grant air rights.

By the time the trench was opened in November 2005, I was history, having moved over to the UP Museum to serve out my final years with the railroad. The city hailed the trench as the city's greatest public works project in its history. It cost more than $282 million. It was 2.5 miles long and ran two and a half miles, eliminating 11 grade crossings. One city official noted no one has been hit by a train in the city since.

The photo shows the eastbound Amtrak San Francisco Zephyr at its Reno station stop on Nov. 27, 1971. Ah, the good old days...

John Bromley - Omaha



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/14 14:17 by Copy19.

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Copy19 Wrote:
> I heard one internal estimate that traffic on the SP Overland
> route dropped to as few as six trains a day.

Yeah, I remember those days. A couple of trips to Donner Pass and Reno in the late Southern Pacific era was "slim pickings" to be sure. One day we only saw only the California Zephyr in daylight and we were told that only a couple trains passed thru during the night. Another day saw only the California Zephyr and a pair of intermodals. Sure not the "good old days" when SP ran what seems like fleets of "Salad Bowl Expresses" over the Mountain.

Fast forward to today and the city still owes most of the money. The sales tax and assessment district isn't generating enough revenue. The UP person who got the city to accept the air rights valuation was brilliant.

A large photo display and timeline of the trench is inside the Reno depot.

As part of the negotiations with Reno, SP needed to demonstrate the levels of train traffic over the years. SP attorney Carol Harris asked me to help, perhaps knowing of my vast storehouse of otherwise useless information. The following numbers came from a review of dispatcher's train sheets, and some of you might find this interesting. The numbers are daily averages and include freight, passenger, work trains and light engines, but not switch moves:

Feb. 1912 23.7
Jul. 1912 27.0

Feb. 1922 30.6
Jul. 1922 32.3

Feb. 1936 19.7
Jul. 1936 28.0

Feb. 1944 45.4
Jul. 1944 53.1

Jan. 1955 20.0
Jul. 1955 27.7

Oct. 1978 19.7

Aug. 1979 18.1

Oct. 1985 10.3

Summer counts are higher, of course, due to perishable traffic. October 1985 shows the effect of the UP-WP merger. The peak of traffic, as one would suspect, was during World War II. The July 1944 counts include an average of 28.0 freights, 21.3 passenger and 3.9 other moves per day.

Best regards,
RL Cabin



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/13/14 12:06 by RLcabin.

Thanks for the info Mr. Cabin. Really needs story of how the railroads of WWII handled all that traffic with little or no resources. It really boggles the mind how they were able to handle that situation when everything had been so slow for so long!

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

Part of it was 16 hour days and no time off

To add to RLCabin's numbers, for Sparks next to Reno, including Amtrak and the BNSF trackage rights trains, there was an average of:
17.6 trains/day for September, 2011
17.3 for October
14.9 for November
12.9 for December
12.7 for January, 2012
12.7 for March
13.5 for April

At Reno Trench,
14 trains We 10/9/13= 9 east 5 west (heavy westbounds go via the Feather River Canyon)
16 trains Th 10/10/13= 11 east 5 west
22 trains Fr 10/11/13= 13 east 9 west

mapboy

funnelfan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks for the info Mr. Cabin. Really needs story
> of how the railroads of WWII handled all that
> traffic with little or no resources. It really
> boggles the mind how they were able to handle that
> situation when everything had been so slow for so
> long!

Adding to that thought, many of the men were gone to
the war effort ..... crews were very old men and some
women who all had the same goal : Move the trains to
the best of our ability ..... (which was substantial).

John,

Thanks for a fine look back to that first year of Amtrak when trains could still be enjoyed in downtown Reno and were a part of the communities character. The Amtrak "City of San Francisco," as many of us still referred to the recently-renamed "San Francisco Zephyr" at that time, still shows colorful BN cars in your photo, and a nine car consist behind what was no doubt an A-B-A set of SP passenger F-units. The former GN, NP and BN-painted cars (other than Burlington and original "California Zephyr" Budd cars) became scarce on that train after the Christmas season in 1971. The A-B-A sets of F-units gave way to four-unit SP-painted FP-7/F-7B lash-ups by the fall of 1972, followed by UP and Amtrak-painted E-units in June of 1973, and finally Amtrak's new SDP40F's in the spring of 1974. Your photo brings back my years of happy memories from the Reno station platform, and other places around town along the Overland Route, watching both the City/SFZ and SP's seemingly endless fleet of PFE reefer blocks in the summer and fall, and manifest/auto parts trains, etc., year-round. Those big lash-ups of SD40's and SD45's really shook the ground passing through downtown Reno heading for "The Hill..." Thanks again and I hope you're enjoying retirement...

ShastaDaylight

One thing I'll always remember back in the days of the ice bunker PFE cars that during the fall rush the eastbound track would always have trails of water across Virginia Street from dripping scuppers on the reefers.
John Bromley
Omaha, Nebraska.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/14 13:31 by Copy19.

I for one don't think SP had it that bad, but jeez, you sure can see "chicken Littles" in the claims on why they didn't want the railroad in the 1ST place!