Railroaders' Nostalgia > Descendants of the Q in my Flint Hills

I’ve long maintained that had I grown up Iowa or Illinois or even Nebraska I would have been a CB&Q fan. Instead I grew up in Kansas as a Santa Fe fan. Even so I had a childhood, pre-1970 BN merger fascination with the Northern Pacific. And this would be because of what I found as a 9 year old underneath the 1964 family Christmas tree: My first HO train set, with an NP GP-7 for power. This led to an early understanding of the kinship between the NP & its future BN siblings GN, SP&S and especially the CB&Q. From family trips to see cousins in Illinois in the 60s I can clearly remember seeing the “Burlington Route” logo on overpasses spanning the highways we took to get there. Also, CB&Q’s “Everywhere West” had a nice ring to it even though the western boundary ended in Laurel, MT. Everywhere Midwest might have been more appropriate, but I liked the “Q” so who am I to argue…

After the BN merger swallowed up the Q & its component siblings I thought the new Cascade Green & Black paint scheme looked pretty sharp. So by default the BN became my second favorite RR. This 2nd favorite status came to a rather rude end when I went to work for the brand-new Montana Rail Link in 1987. I very quickly came to experience first-hand the BN ‘Darth Vader’ style of RR management which permeated MRL in the early years. (But that’s a whole other story…)

The other day ‘mg8711’ & I were out shooting trains in my old Santa Fe territory; the Flint Hills. The recent derailment fiasco at Neosho Rapids had been cleared up enough to let loose a flood of backed-up traffic. We were still shooting at sundown and recorded this unit grain train rolling north (TT west) between Bazaar & Matfield Green, KS. When I got home and tossed these images up on the screen I noticed I had an all-BN situation on my hands. The lead unit was a BNSF behemoth still in BN Grinstein paint. And even with a purposeful touch of speed-blurring I had inadvertently captured an old BN logo on a grain hopper. Instead of expending mental energy on this current thing called BNSF, I went the other, more nostalgic direction and realized I had a couple of images of descendants of the CB&Q. So what I have here is a hint of what might have been my favorite RR (were it not for childhood geography) rolling on the mainline formerly belonging to my favorite RR, the Santa Fe. And all this through my favorite railfanning area on the entire planet, the Kansas Flint Hills!

Railroading & railfanning nostalgia indeed… :^)

1. BNSF Grinstein 9632 leads a unit grainer up through the Chase County Flint Hills just below Nickel Creek, silhouetted in a Kansas sunset.

2. An speed-blurred old BN hopper is in frozen motion, letting the sunset colors reach my camera.
(2 photos taken near Matfield Green, KS on May 17, 2015)

Thanks for listening!
Lance Garrels
santafe199

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Wow ... nice images ... thanks for sharing them!!!

Odyssey
Evergreen, CO

Absolutely beautiful with just a liitle imagation you can be right there what a sight great job old timer.