Grassroots Railroad Sports?

The Rock Island Lines Silvis Shop main bay was divided in half. The east half was called "The Ramp" and that is where running repairs and FRA inspections were done. West, the half shown was the back shop where heavy repairs and rebuilds were done. At the very back on the middle left track is GP7R #4508, the first unit to wear the Ingram era white and blue livery. The #4508 went to C&NW after The Rock was liquidated, and then was later sold to Frontier Cooperative Company, where it is still in operation down in Nebraska switching grain silos.

Rock Island E8A #643 leads a special train headed down to the University of Iowa football game. Passenger cars have been leased from Amtrak to supplant the aging Rock Island passenger car fleet.

Rock Island #652 with the Chicago-Rock Island Quad Cities Rocket, the withered remains of the Rocky Mountain Rocket. The Rock Island never owned any dome cars, but there is a combination round-end observation/dome at the tail of the train. That's Big Ben, a combination observation/dome that was originally built for C&O's stillborn Chessie ultra-luxury train in '48. After the Chessie never materialized, it was sold off by C&O to D&RGW, who used it for many years. By this point, it had been sold to Butterworth Tours, who owned a fleet of 14 passenger cars based out of Chicago that they would lease. The Rock Island was the foremost lessee of Butterworth Tours cars, using them as an upgrade to their own aging fleet.

Bill Butterworth, and his wife Bonnie, were BIG supporters of passenger rail and came to an arrangement with the Rock Island. A ticket on the Butterworth cars included a complimentary newspaper and either breakfast or dinner in the Rock Island dining car. Butterworth paid the Rock Island to haul the cars, sell tickets and reimbursed the railroad for the meals served their customers in the diner. After the entire Rock Island diner car fleet was permanently sidelined by cracked sills, Butterworth Tours even put their ex-DL&W diner into service instead on the Quad Cities Rocket. This whole arrangement was a bit of a sweetheart deal for the RI, as it allowed them to replace the money-losing railroad-operated parlor-lounge car with a car that theoretically paid its own way and helped offset the costs of operating the dining car. Butterworth also used RI employees to staff the car, which the railroad would have had to pay to sit home under labor protection agreements. At least on the surface, there was no downside for the Rock Island.

Butterworth Tours marketed their premium service, and the Rock Island's passenger service in general, rather heavily, taking out ads in local newspapers and radio stations. They also partnered with groups in on-line cities like Ottawa and LaSalle to promote the RI's passenger service, stressing the "use it or lose it" nature of passenger rail. Butterworth also organized regular group moves on the Rockets to Chicago for baseball games, Christmas shopping, handling school groups to what is now referred to as the "Museum Campus" along the lakefront and pretty much any other excuse Bill could come up with for people to go to Chicago for the day. In the summers and over the holidays in the early 70s it was not uncommon to see the Quad City Rocket with three Es and well over a dozen cars when Butterworth had a tour going. There were also pure charter moves every fall from Rock Island to Iowa City for Iowa Hawkeye football games.

Sadly, as timekeeping and ride quality declined, the premium parlor-lounge service started losing money as fast as the rest of the train did. Payments to the RI were seriously in arrears when the railroad declared bankruptcy in March 1975 and a bankrupt railroad could ill afford to extend credit to a faltering operation, no matter how well-intentioned it may have been. A couple of these cars survived in Butterworth hands until 1989, and were used on the Quad City Rocket Dinner Train, a short-lived venture by Butterworth Tours that ran between Rock Island, IL, and Wilton, IA, during the spring and summer of 1989.

E8A #855 at La Salle Street Station with the Quad Cities Rocket.

The gloomy weather conditions and poor quality track seem to convey the future of the Rock Island in this 1973 photo. Those are the old "Capone Car" coaches on the far tracks, although those who were around back then insist that that moniker is a more recent invention and that back then they were just called "2500s" after the number series. 

A shot of Butterworth Tours' Big Ben at Blue Island in '73. During it's time on the D&RGW's Royal Gorge, the Rio Grande hacked up the round end to add a vestibule so that they could run it as a mid-train car. 

When Union Pacific retired a bunch of E8s as they withdrew passenger trains from service, Rock Island scooped them up to replace the old E7s and FP7s that they were still running. Shortly after purchasing them, the Rock Island also began trimming down the fleet of Rockets and so the ex-UP machines were bumped down to Trailer-On-Flatcar service, same as what the Erie-Lackawanna did with their E8s.

The Limon-Colorado Springs segment of the Rocky Mountain Rocket for which CRI&P #750 was a distant memory, but the one-of-two EMD AB6s was still alive and well in commuter service, running in push-pull configuration with sister AB6 #751 and E6 #630 and Bombardier dual-level coaches. Rock Island had needed a locomotive to take a segment of the Rocky Mountain Rocket to Colorado Springs but didn't want to tag in a second E6A elephant-style and break up the streamlined appearance. So EMD cooked up the AB6, which was an E6B with added front windows, control stand, and headlamp and one of the 567 V12s deleted to add a baggage compartment. The AB6 tucked right in behind an E6A, and unless you noticed the headlamp fairing and windows, and then, when the train split at Limon, the lead E6A uncoupled, the AB6 took the front couple cars off and away it went. In it's commuter train life, it had the baggage compartment removed and the second 567 added back in, making it closer to a true E6. Sadly, despite surviving well into the mid '70s, neither the #750 or #751 escaped the scrapper torch, nor did the fourth curiosity in the Rock Island commuter fleet, EMD-repowered Alco DL-109 #621 Cristine. Also, there's Big Ben in what is likely the Quad Cities Rocket on the next track over.

Rock Island #1298 leads a freight train on the Twin Cities line at Iowa Falls, Iowa. The #1298 is a "torpedo tube" passenger Geep but is being used in freight service.

GP40 #348 leads the way, with a much less common paint scheme. The #348 and 39 identical sisters were part of the motive power financed by Union Pacific to prop the Rock Island's roster up as the UP-RI merger proceedings were underway. Rock Island was actually in talks with Alco for C430s, but Union Pacific had no desire to end up with the Alcos on their roster if the merger went through, and so when they caught wind, they forced the Rock to buy GP40s instead. Hard to say if an additional 40 C430s would have saved Alco, seems unlikely, and in the end it didn't really matter, because when UP was handed the GP40s back during the 1980 liquidation of the Rock Island, the majority of them were found to be so strung out that UP scrapped a lot of them.

Looking like a standard F-unit, that's a rare machine in the lead of the freight at Sable, Colorado. Even hardcore diesel fans have trouble identifying EMD’s F2As. Only 104 of these transitional models rolled out of La Grange in five months of 1946, sandwiched between production of the pioneering FT and the best-selling F3. Rock Island bought a dozen, all A-units, and for some reason assigned them two-digit road numbers, the only such on the railroad. One of the F2As was smashed up in a pretty severe wreck and Rock Island rebuilt the front end without the upper headlight nacelle, resulting in a freakish looking machine.

One of the AB6s survived the big crash in Montgomery, IL.

The Discovery Channel has a program called Mighty Trains.  Pretty informative.

I grew up across the river from Rock Island in Davenport. 
 

The Rock Island Depot was something I remember driving by on numerous occasions, and I believe there was at least one trip to Chicago on the Rocket in the very early 70s

My parents drove by the Moline Depot (different railroad, I think) every day as they crossed the I-74 bridge. It was apparently in pretty rough shape and demolished to make way for the new, recently completed I-74 bridge. 

Karacticus said:

My parents drove by the Moline Depot (different railroad, I think) every day as they crossed the I-74 bridge. It was apparently in pretty rough shape and demolished to make way for the new, recently completed I-74 bridge. 

That was from the Davenport, Rock Island & Northwestern, which was a switching railroad serving the Quad Cities, later jointly owned by Burlington Northern and Milwaukee Road

Rock Island's famed Cristine, #621. Technically an Alco DL-107 but usually referred to as a DL-109, she was sent to EMD in '52 for the replacement of the old Macintosh & Seymour 539T inline-8s with EMD 567 V12s, making the #621 into an E6A under the Otto Kuhler-designed sheetmetal. The only giveaways that all was not as she had left Schenectady was the domed roofline and the removal of the big side-mounted radiators. Given the tongue-in-cheek nickname of Cristine as a reference to Cristine Jorgensen, the #621 rattled around in various duties until retirement in the early '70s. Despite owning a hand ful.of other DLs, the Rock Island didn't convert any others. If I had to guess, either the cost for repowering was too high or EMD gave them a better deal just to trade them in on E7s

While Rock Island didn't repower any further DLs, they did have some FA-1s that were given EMD hearts, classified as FA-1ms. Rock Island tried giving Alco a fair amount of business early on, buying DLs, FAs, RS-1s, and RS-3s. But crankshaft failures in the 244-powered machines rapidly soured the Rock on the machines from Schenectady. Rock Island skipped the entirety of the later RS-series and wouldn't give Alco a chance until the '60s. They tried to order C430s but Union Pacific put their foot down, and they did manage to sneak through an order for C415s but those were truly terrible machines.

I'm excited to see if you find cool photos of the last years of the SP in TX ever.  

Shiny old E6A #631 and a grimy newer E7 are paired up elephant-style on the front of the Rocky Mountain Rocket at Iowa City, Iowa in 1966. Normally the train would be passing through here in the pre-dawn darkness, so it's clearly several hours behind schedule. Rock Island was an earlier adopter of Trailers-On-Flatcars and was known to put priority loads in their passenger trains. While they weren't entirely unique in doing that, Southern Railway was another for example, they were unique in that they put the TOFC loads at the front of the train. First of all, putting the passengers at the rear of the train made the slack action worse and resulted in a poorer ride. But also, you still had to get steam from the generators aboard the diesels to the passenger cars for heat, which meant Rock Island had to build a number of flatcars with steam heat pass-through lines.

FP-7 #405 leads what was formerly the Imperial near Harington, Kansas. By this point, the train had lost its name and had been downgraded to what was basically a mail train, with a single Southern Pacific coach tacked onto the end in the event that it had any passengers aboard.

Creeping along in unfamiliar territory, Rock Island U25B #210 makes its way past damaged ATSF right-of-way at Spruce, Colorado, on its way to Denver with piggyback and auto loads. The line had only just been put back into service after the massive floods in 1965 closed down most rail service. For several weeks, Rock Island freights out of Denver had been using the ATSF/Colorado & Southern Joint Line for access to its own Colorado Springs-Limon branch. The Rock was taking advantage of the flood damage to do some upgrades, lowering tracks under a bridge in Colorado Springs in order to accommodate piggyback loads.