Monday, September 29, 2025
I got called for a trip to Winslow on a stack train with a female engineer. We had a student engineer.
It was a long trip. Over 10 hours. I complained about it being too cold and the student engineer did turn the AC off. He must have turned it on again because I was still cold. My nose was running. I out on my carhart and my wool cap and didn't say anything. I wanted to get off that train.
As we entered Winslow I saw 5 emergency vehicles on the I-40. A car had overturned and caught fire. The fire was out by the time we got there but it was still smoking. We pulled into the yard. I told the outbound, "The AC works good."
I waited 15 minutes and they hadn't departed. I went inside and tied up. I had heard that I might not get a hotel room due to the fact that it was the weekend of the "Standing On the Corner Festival." but I had no trouble getting a room. I was in time for the breakfast. I slept until 4 pm, went down to the grill, and watched the Green Bay Packers play the Dallas Cowboys while I ate something. I went back to bed. I got my call at 1 am. I was going back to Needles with a different engineer. I was called for the "H BELBAR." It was a very small train. It only had 42 cars, was just over 3700 tons, and was over 2600 feet.
"We probably won't be setting out any cars," I said to myself.
I had the van stop at McDonald's on the way to the depot and I got two hamburgers. I printed out the work order. We were supposed to pick up 8 cars in the yard. I talked to the trainmaster and he said that 7 of the cars were in one track and one car was in another. He said that if it were up to him we would just pick up one car but it wasn't up to him. There was no herder on duty.
I told my engineer about the pick up. We waited. Another train had to pick up a motor, and another H train had a great deal of work to do in the yard. After a long wait the trainmaster came out and told us to take the van out to East WInslow and get on our train. They highballed our pick up. We were happy about that.
The van ran us out to East Winslow. SInce he was what we call a "radius driver' he wasn't sure how to get here but he got us there. We got on our train and started moving. We hadn't gone very far when we heard someone say that a car was rolling free at Purina (the Purina Dog Chow factory in Flagstaff). We weren't sure if the car was rolling down the main line or not. Traffic stopped for a while. We started to move again. We came to a red intermediate signal. The disptatcher told us to proceed at 10 MPH and look for a broken rail. We did. My engineer saw the broken rail and stopped the train before we went over it. I reported the location of the broken rail. We would have to wait for the track supervisor to give us permission to go over the break. It took him over an hour to get out there He photographed it and measured it as being over 4". He gave us permission to proceed over the break at 10 MPH. We did so. The disptatcher told us that we would be relieved at Flagstaff, in front of the Purina factory. We had been on duty for nearly 7 hours by the time we got there We saw the car that had run away. It had not made it onto the main. It was a hopper. It had tipped over in the siding. There was a lot of dog food on the ground.
Our relief crew was glad to get our ttrain because it was small and had a lot of power (We had 3 good engines, and 3 dead engines on the head end). I asked the van driver to stop at Maverick and got a burrito. He took us to Needles and we tied up under 11 hours. I don't know when I will go out again. I have attached a picture of the broken rail, and our leader on the Belbar, what we call a "red nose."
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