In reply to NickD :
Ooh that's purdy!
In reply to NickD :
Ooh that's purdy!
D&RGW Alco PA-1 #6001 at Colorado Springs with Train #1, The Royal Gorge, which departed Denver at 9:00 AM, Mountain Standard Time, and arrived in Colorado Springs at 10:40 AM. Ten minutes was allowed for the station stop during which the CB&Q's Denver Zephyr cars were cut off the train. After the Denver Zephyr cars are uncoupled, #1 will continue on to Pueblo and then terminate at Salida at 3:15 PM. The Denver Zephyr cars will be moved to the other side of town by the Rio Grande's switcher and picked up by the returning The Royal Gorge, Train #2, and forwarded to Denver where they will be cut into the waiting Denver Zephyr for the final leg of the journey to Chicago over the CB&Q.
The D&RGW leg of the joint CB&Q/Western Pacific/D&RGW California Zephyr at Grand Junction. Since the D&RGW's rugged route meant it couldn't compete with the Union Pacific's City of San Francisco on time, D&RGW scheduled it so that it would travel through the Rockies in the daytime and beat the City of San Francisco on scenery.
One of D&RGW's immense 4-6-6-4 Challengers. The box on the nose with the chevrons painted on was an additional sand box added by the D&RGW because they used a lot of sand to get over the Rockies. The canisters on the sides of the firebox are overfire jets. These blew compressed air over the fire to improve combustion at low speeds when there wasn't a strong draft. Their effectiveness is debated but they did cut down on smoke while building a fire. They were also supposedly ungodly loud.
Also note the third rail inside the gauge. This was taken at Salida, and for a while Salida was dual-gauge to accommodate their narrow gauge and standard gauge operations.
A D&RGW Pacific. It's smoke bonnet on the stack and extra sand domes were D&RGW-requisites for the rugged territory and tunnels. The front brakeman's "doghouse" on the tender is a bit unusual for a passenger locomotive.
Five D&RGW GP30s slug it out on a freight train headed through Illinois over CB&Q tracks. The D&RGW was a railroad at war with nature and physics, and it frequently won. Steep grades, long tunnels, high altitudes, heavy snow. The D&RGW's response was to throw a lot of horsepower on the head end of a train, some more on the back, and go like hell.
Grungy GP40-2s grind past a track speeder on the Tennessee Pass
A former Denver & Salt Lake wrecker hooks onto the front of a Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range 2-8-8-4 Yellowstone, #224, on the Fireclay Loop on the Denver & Rio Grande Western. The DM&IR's traffic would drop off heavily in the winter, and so they worked out a deal where they would lease out their big Yellowstones to the D&RGW for use on Tennessee Pass. The D&RGW crews proclaimed the big 2-8-8-4s to be the best engines to roll on D&RGW rails. This arrangement came to an end after the winter of '43, when #224 suffered an air brake failure and was wrecked by the D&RGW. The engine was repaired and operated through until 1958 before being scrapped, but D&RGW didn't borrow them anymore. I'm sure that was an embarrassing call.
The Rio Grande Zephyr, the last privately operated intercity passenger train. Inaugurated in 1970, after Western Pacific bailed out of the California Zephyr, the D&RGW operated it between Denver and Ogden until 1983. The D&RGW refused to hand over operations to Amtrak and so ran the service with their own equipment until '83, when mounting losses resulted in them finally handing the keys over to Amtrak. Amtrak did not continue the RGZ though, as they had instead revived the old California Zephyr name on the new San Francisco Zephyr (a mashup of California Zephyr and UP's City of San Francisco) and there was overlaps between the RGZ and the CZ
In reply to NickD :
That's very pretty. They missed a bet not giving the Dajiban matching livery, though.
Duke said:In reply to NickD :
That's very pretty. They missed a bet not giving the Dajiban matching livery, though.
I was reading a thing where it was people recalling some of the odd characters that you were bound to run into at any excursion you went to in the '70s-'90s, and people recalled there was a guy with an old Dodge Van painted in PRR Tuscan Red with the gold pinstripes and a set of actual train horns mounted on the roof. They said the van was cool, but the guy driving it was a right berkeleying shiny happy person. He would always take up the prime pacing position when chasing a steam locomotive and would refuse to let anyone get by.
D&RGW also ran a fun little operation called the Ski Train. Started in '40, it was originally a Denver & Salt Lake operation. The train's scenic route left Union Station and traveled through northwest suburban Denver before starting a 4,000 feet climb via a series of 29 tunnels through the Plainview, Crescent, Wondervu and Gross Reservoir areas, then generally west along South Boulder Creek through Pinecliff, Tolland and Rollinsville to Moffat Tunnel and then unloaded passengers less than 100 yards from the base of the ski lifts of Winter Park Resort. There was one trip in each direction per day, with a travel time of 2 hours and 15 minutes, assuming no delays from freight rail traffic.
Proving reasonably popular (train lengths of 20 cars or more were not uncommon), the Rio Grande continued it after purchasing the Denver & Salt Lake in '47. It ran behind a wide variety It received diesel power in the early '50s when D&RGW dieselized and in '60 received an upgrade in the form of some 1915-era Northern Pacific heavyweight cars. These were replaced again in the '80s with some 1968-built Hawker Siddeley Tempo cars purchased from Canadian National. In the steam era, motive power seemed to be what ever the D&SL/D&RGW felt like running at the time. There are photos of D&SL 2-6-6-0 Mallets and Consolidations, D&RGW Pacifics and 4-8-4 "Westerns" and even an account of D&RGW using one of their big 2-8-8-2 simple articulateds. In the diesel era, it was usually powered by F-units, although GP40s were frequently used in the '70s. The last year the F9s were used was in '84, and SD40T-2 "Tunnel Motors" also made frequent appearances.
In '88, D&RGW decided they wanted out of the Ski Train after mounting losses, but the train was still rather popular. Instead, Ansco Investment took over the operation. It would still use D&RGW power and head end crews, but the passenger cars would belong to Ansco, as would the car personnel and Ansco would run the affair. After the SP/D&RGW merger, Southern Pacific and St. Louis Southwestern bloody nose EMDs were not uncommon sights on the front end either, as D&RGW was slowly merged into Southern Pacific.
Ansco eventually replaced D&RGW freight power with leased Amtrak F40PHs, later purchasing three of the F40s from Amtrak and repainting them into D&RGW gold and silver.
The Ski Train was burdened with escalating costs such as liability insurance coverage, operational conflicts with freight traffic, and substantial uncertainties posed by redevelopment of Denver's Union Station. These reasons combined with the worldwide economic maladies in 2009 meant that it was no longer feasible for the Ski Train to be operated. The F40s and passengers cars were sold to Algoma Central, which meant that ironically the ex-CN passenger cars ended back up in CN ownership again. And for 6 years there was no Ski Train. Then, for the 75th anniversary, Amtrak decided to run a special one-day-only Amtrak Winter Park Express Ski Train on Saturday, March 14, 2015, announced on February 25 and more than 450 seats sold out in less than 10 hours. By popular demand, a second train was added for Sunday, March 15, and it also sold out quickly. Amtrak and Union Pacific entered talks and in 2017, the Ski Train was reinstated as an Amtrak operation. Union Pacific even lent Amtrak their #1989, the D&RGW heritage unit, to lead the train.
Iowa Pacific Holdings actually attempted to run the revived Ski Train, using their Rio Grande Scenic Railway equipment, but talks between IPH and Amtrak and Union Pacific fell apart and then IPH went belly-up, so for right now it remains a joint UP/Amtrak operation.
What's the story on Iowa Pacific? I think the Monticello, IL museum might have been using some of their equipment back in the early 2000'sz
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
They were a big holding company that bought a ton of railroads, both short lines and tourist lines. For freight they originally had the Texas-New Mexico Railroad and the West Texas & Lubbock Railroad in 2002. They then went on to acquire the Arizona Eastern Railway in 2004 (they sold it to Genesee & Wyoming in 2011]) the San Luis & Rio Grande in 2005,[4] the Chicago Terminal Railroad in 2006, and the Mount Hood Railroad in 2008. The Rio Grande Scenic Railroad began operations in 2006 over the San Luis & Rio Grande, the Mount Hood Railroad operated both freight and passenger services, and the same year Copper Spike Excursion Train service began over Arizona Eastern trackage.
The Saratoga & North Creek Railroad began operations in the summer of 2011, offering scheduled passenger rail service, as opposed to excursion trains. Passenger operations ceased on April 7, 2018, and the final revenue freight train to remove stored tank cars operated in May 2018. They owned those BL2s that are on Ozark Mountain Railcar.
In 2012, Iowa Pacific acquired three railroad operations during the year: In April it acquired the Texas State Railroad, an excursion train operating between Palestine and Rusk, TX. In May it acquired operating rights on the Santa Cruz Branch Line between Watsonville and Davenport. The company established the Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay Railroad to run freight and passenger services on the line and In October it purchased Cape Rail, a company that runs Massachusetts Coastal Railroad and Cape Cod Central.
They also experimented with offering Pullman car service on Amtrak's City Of New Orleans, where a couple of IPH's Illinois Central-painted Pullmans were tagged onto the back of the Amtrak trains for customers willing to pay extra. They also had a deal with the Indiana Department of Transportation and Amtrak to supply rolling stock and on-board services personnel for the Hoosier State, which runs between Chicago and Indianapolis.
I'm not entirely sure what resulted in it, but a couple years ago, Iowa Pacific defaulted on a $5M loan and has since gone into receivership. Part of it might have been a case of "too much, too fast", they were buying up operations left and right. I also know that some stuff happened, like the San Luis & Rio Grande Railroad got hit by a wildfire that badly damage their track and forced them to cease operations of both the SL&RG and Rio Grande Scenic, and Texas State Railroad had to park all their steam engines after the new boilers sourced from an industrial boiler supplier started cracking. There are also people who said that the owner of IP's greatest weakness is spending so much on the flash and buying cars and locomotives that the actual core business was ignored. There could be a small business in a boutique tour service with 2 or 3 private cars on the rear of an Amtrak train providing a level of service that is very different from Amtrak. What was not necessary was the 5 car monster (with a baggage car!) added to the City of New Orleans .Likewise, the Hoosier State did not really need a great meal service pulled by a barely serviceable F40PH. It needed a schedule and frequency better than the current state.
So, currently a bunch of IPH equipment is up for sale, including
•Electro-Motive F9PH Nos. 1101 and 1102 from the former Santa Cruz & Monterey Bay operation in California;
•Electro-Motive GP9 No. 88 and GP38-2 No. 2 from Oregon’s Mount Hood Railroad;
•Electro-Motive BL2 Nos. 52 and 56 from the Saratoga & North Creek operation;
•Electro-Motive E8A Nos. 807 and 808 from the Saratoga & North Creek operation;
•Former Southern Pacific Baldwin 2-6-0 No. 1744, former Lake Superior & Ishpeming 2-8-0 #18, and former Lake Superior & Ishpeming 2-8-0 No. 20 from the San Luis & Rio Grande in Colorado;
•Former US Army D&H-painted Alco S3 No. 821;
•Full length dome cars: Nos. 1394 Prairie View; 508 Canyon View; 509 Cascade View; 510 Sunset View; 512 Alpine View, and 551 Sky View
•Four coaches, a kitchen car, a table car, and an entertainment car from the Mount Hood operation;
•Four former Long Island Rail Road commuter coaches.
In reply to NickD :
Wow, that's crazy. I had no idea he had his hands in so many lines. What I remember when I was at Monticello around 2002-03 was a pair of F-units & matching Pullman cars in vintage IC livery, but I have a vague memory they had something other than "Illinois Central" on them. I also remember one of the volunteers stating they were all owned by the same person, so I'm not sure there's anyone else out there with an entire similar train?
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
Ed Ellis was the guys name. He started as a brakeman on the Illinois Central (hence why he painted his E- and F-Units and Pullmans in IC passenger livery) and was also a big wheel at C&NW and Amtrak. He also owned a couple heritage lines in the UK under IPH. A lot of people say he was prone to taking out loans and trying to dodge repayment for years. He was also like a kid in a candy store. Some of the short lines made big money in the oil fracking boom but he pissed the profits away playing 1:1-scale model railroad. To be fair, if I owned a railroad, I'd probably be a similar way.
I reread Clive Cussler's Night Probe recently. A key part of the plot is that a fictional treaty that would have handed Canada over to the US as part of a loan payment to Britain during WWI is lost when the train is traveling aboard supposedly plunges into the Hudson River after the bridge is washed out and the train is never found. Clive Cussler makes up the fictional New York & Quebec Northern Railroad as the railroad line. Interestingly, the crack passenger train of the NY&QNRR is the Manhattan Limited, which was actually a real train operated by the Pennsy between New York City and Chicago from 1903 to 1971. Cussler was mighty knowledgeable on antique cars and nautical matters, but railroads were clearly not his thing, as the engine pulling the train is noted to be a 2-8-0 Consolidation. Consols were not a passenger engine. They used short drivers and no trailing truck, so they would have been a rough ride at speed. You saw them on passenger trains on branch lines, were they were typically moving at low speed, but not on a mainline train unless being used as a helper for a grade or in the event of a motive power failure where it was all the railroad could spare. In that era, you would have had an Atlantic, Ten-Wheeler or Pacific on the point.
Now, the idea of a train plunging into a river after a bridge washes out and never being found was not something he made up. He actually based the story off a very real occurence. Just it was almost forty years earlier and much further west and with a freight train. In 1878, a Kansas Pacific freight train loaded with scrap (some of the urban legend websites love to list it as being a passenger train, but thats incorrect) was being pulled by a Baldwin-built 4-6-0, #51, when a storm washed out a bridge over the Kiowa Creek near the city of Kiowa, Colorado. The engineer missed the telegraph operator trying to flag them down and the train plunged into the river. The bodies of the front end crew were found washed up further downriver shortly afterwards, all dead, and the city of Kiowa was renamed Bennett in honor of the engineer, whose last name was Bennett.
The Kansas Pacific launched a salvage operation and recovered the freight cars and the tender of the engine, but supposedly the locomotive was never recovered. This information came from a 12 year old boy who worked on the recovery operation the entire summer as a steam donkey operator and a 12 year old girl who brought lunch down to the work crews every day. They later married and had children and swore that the locomotive was never found and recovered. Many theorized that the weight of the loaded scrap iron cars pushed the locomotive down into the mud at the bottom of the river. In 1881, a guy went down to the creek with a crowbar that he had magnetized and walked up and down the bank and at one spot the crowbar agitated wildly and he swore that was the resting place of the locomotive. He presented this finding to Jay Gould, who owned the Union Pacific, which had bought out the Kansas Pacific in 1880, but Gould seemed disinterested. After that, the fate of KP #51 largely faded away, with just the locals remembering the missing locomotive and all the usual ghost stories of "if you go down by the creek on a rainy night under a full moon in May, you can still see #51 trying to cross the bridge blah, blah, blah."
After publishing Night Probe and making good money off the royalties of his books, Clive Cussler kept coming back to #51 and scratching his head at it's disappearance. Unlike a ship lost in the ocean with no known last location, the #51 shouldn't have been that hard to find. The Kiowa Creek was relatively small, the bridge's location was known, the train was known to have gone into the river, and the tender and the cars and crew were found. After his son and him did a few exploratory trips to the area, they decided to undertake a major search and asked for volunteers, as well as securing an excavator and bringing a dive team. The volunteer request turned out to be a mistake as over 100 people showed up, with no real clue what they were doing. Cussler said that they were digging everywhere, getting all excited anytime they found something, and anytime someone thought that they had found anything, everyone would drop what they they were doing to run over and see what was going on. A sharp curve had developed in the Kiowa Creek just downstream from the bridge, and usually that happens when something is buried in the river, but digging at that location only turned up a large ancient tree trunk that had sunk in the mud. Eventually they called the search off, citing the need to do more research.
Months after the aborted search, Clive Cussler received a call from a Union Pacific employee. The UP employee said he had access to the UP's archives, which included the Kansas Pacific archives (and presumably any other line that was acquired by UP) and had heard of their search and done some digging. According to this employee, the Kansas Pacific #51's builder serial number pops back up on the Union Pacific roster in 1881, but now numbered #1056. What they were able to surmise is that Kansas Pacific sent a second crew down to secretly recover the engine at night, tucked it away somewhere, then wrote the engine off as lost and collected the insurance money, with plans to put the engine back in operation once things died down a few years later. It explains why Gould was disinterested when the one guy said he supposedly had found it; Gould likely knew what was up and knew it wasn't there. So, rather than finding a missing locomotive, Clive Cussler uncovered a 110 year old insurance scam.
In reply to NickD :
Wow, that's almost crazier than some of his books.
NickD said:In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
Ed Ellis was the guys name. He started as a brakeman on the Illinois Central (hence why he painted his E- and F-Units and Pullmans in IC passenger livery) and was also a big wheel at C&NW and Amtrak. He also owned a couple heritage lines in the UK under IPH. A lot of people say he was prone to taking out loans and trying to dodge repayment for years. He was also like a kid in a candy store. Some of the short lines made big money in the oil fracking boom but he pissed the profits away playing 1:1-scale model railroad. To be fair, if I owned a railroad, I'd probably be a similar way.
At that time the concept of an individual owning an entire vintage passenger train was so far beyond anything I could conceive that it was almost bewildering.
Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:NickD said:In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
Ed Ellis was the guys name. He started as a brakeman on the Illinois Central (hence why he painted his E- and F-Units and Pullmans in IC passenger livery) and was also a big wheel at C&NW and Amtrak. He also owned a couple heritage lines in the UK under IPH. A lot of people say he was prone to taking out loans and trying to dodge repayment for years. He was also like a kid in a candy store. Some of the short lines made big money in the oil fracking boom but he pissed the profits away playing 1:1-scale model railroad. To be fair, if I owned a railroad, I'd probably be a similar way.
At that time the concept of an individual owning an entire vintage passenger train was so far beyond anything I could conceive that it was almost bewildering.
Monticello will soon have an Illinois Central E8. It's actually ex-PRR, but it's being restored as an Illinois Central unit. A guy bought it back in 2004, had it moved there and has been restoring it to operation all by himself for the past 17 years. Its going to be numbered #4044, which is one number higher than the last of IC's E8s.
Also. Monticello now allows for people to operate their equipment. Their list is:
Unfortunately you don't get to request what to operate, its just whatever they are operating that day. I'd love to operate the Wabash F7 or the FPA-4, and the RS-1325 is cool because of rarity, but if I went there and got stuck operating a GP9 or an NW-2, not gonna lie, I'd be pretty disappointed. Also, they don't let you operate their steam engine, Southern #401, a pretty little 2-8-0. #401 was due for her 1472 this year, but in a brilliant move, Monticello did it last year when they couldn't have visitors, so that when they reopen, the #401 will be ready to go.
I heard the same story about a locomotive disappearing, but it was a a couple of Rock Island units at the Cimarron River before Sampson of the Cimarron was built. On another subject: I see there is a rare locomotive for sale in Boulder, CO. An EMD G8...of Canadian Heritage.
LS_BC8 said:I heard the same story about a locomotive disappearing, but it was a a couple of Rock Island units at the Cimarron River before Sampson of the Cimarron was built. On another subject: I see there is a rare locomotive for sale in Boulder, CO. An EMD G8...of Canadian Heritage.
That Rock Island 4-4-0, as far as I know. Some guy dove down and retrieved the whistle in 1940 and it was installed at the Kingfisher power plant and blown at shift change until the '80s. Someone also tried to retrieve the entire engine in '63 and Rock Island took legal action to stop him. It was buried under 9 feet of sand and resting against a bridge pier and they were concerned that retrieval efforts could damage the bridge.
That EMD G8 has been on there for a long time.
There is also a B&M Pacific, #3666, that sank in the Piscataqua River in '39. A couple years back they brought one of the tender trucks up from the river bottom and they are at a museum.
On the topic of weird Canadian EMDs, you had the GMD1, which was sold to CN and CP. It was essentially an SW1200 but with a short hood and looked like an EMD copy of an Alco RS-1. They built them between 1958 and 1960, and as of today CN still has a few on the roster and recently dug them out of storage to handle a power shortage.
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