Railroaders' Nostalgia > If wishes came true.

The summer of 2003, I was engineer on the Albany Relief Job, two days on the Eugene job, two on the Toledo run and one night on the yard switcher.  Getting ready to depart from Albany to Toledo on August 10, 2003, we gathered our paperwork and went through it.  I found this, told my conductor that the UP warrant was no good.  I don't remember much beyond that , but I thought about the possibilites for a moment, got our new warrants and squirreled this bogus one away in my grip.  Imagine the radio call, "PNWR 2311 to Albany dispatch, we're pulling through Ambrose, do we stil have a pickup at Alturas?"  Was the Modoc still open in 2003, I can't remember.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/06/23 20:21 by roustabout.

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No it wasn't

The open/close/open/close dates have always confused me, seems there were times when they simply didn't run anything whether it was called open or closed.

Here's some info from a TrainWeb summary:

http://www.trainweb.org/highdesertrails/sp.html

The Modoc Line, despite its advantages as a route to the east, was still a tough and expensive piece of railroad to operate and maintain. On 23 January 1987 SP closed the Modoc line as a through route. However, the closure would last for only a year, as in 1988 the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad purchased the SP. The D&RGW management made improving service to Oregon lumber shippers a top goal of the newly created Southern Pacific Lines, and part of that program was the immediate reactivation of the Modoc line as a through route. However, the anticipated traffic failed to materialize, and by the time that Union Pacific purchased the SP in late 1996 only one train a day continued to use the line. UP considered its options with the Modoc line for a few months, eventually choosing to close the line again at the end of June 1997.

The line lay in wait for the next several years. Eventually UP elected to scrap the middle portion of the line, from a point south of Alturas to Wendel. A salvage firm removed the rails on this stretch in 2003. UP continued to operate a weekly freight from Klamath Falls to Alturas to maintain the interchange with the [u] Lake County Railroad[/u] until 1 November 2005, when UP leased the trackage to the new [u]Modoc Northern Railroad.[/u] The Modoc Northern survived until May 2009,