First view of derailment area from CO Highway 24, November 27, 1994.
On the morning of Tuesday, November 22, 1994, a friend of mine who was the environmental manager at the Southern Pacific in Denver, Colorado, called me at my office at the Transportation Technology Center to say that there had been a derailment early that morning on Tennessee Pass. The air brakes on a train load of taconite pellets failed to function after cresting the top of the pass. Almost the entire train derailed on a 10 degree curve, he said, and that there were some injuries but fortunately no lives were lost. I wanted to see the aftermath but couldn’t get away until Sunday morning.
Southern Pacific’s freight traffic from Northern California to the Sunset Route to the southeast faced significant congestion in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s. SP’s solution was to build a 78-mile line across Cajon Pass and the western Mojave Desert. The line was completed in 1967.
The line starts at the San Joaquin Line in Palmdale, rises to the top of Cajon Pass (Summit on the Santa Fe, Hiland on the SP), and then roughly parallels the Santa Fe down the hill. It connects with the Sunset Route at Colton Yard.
Surveying the line in 1964. The Santa Fe at Summit is in the cut.Read more
This is Dale Bryan, thirty-three-year-old Southern Pacific relief second-trick telegrapher-clerk at Paso Robles, California (Paso de Robles/pass of oaks) on a warm July evening in 1960. And these are the tools of his trade:
Clockwise: earphone; scissors phone; shelves for 3-, 5-, 7- and 9-copy blank train-order forms (with carbons at the ready); dispatcher’s loudspeaker; westbound and eastbound annunciators (‘bells’); Motorola radio; clearance cards; telephone line ‘jacks’; ‘O.S.’ sheet; levers for westbound and eastbound train-order semaphores (‘order boards’ on the SP); a red flag and of course a classic Underwood typewriter. Although he is still referred to officially as a ‘telegrapher,’ Dale no longer has Morse code in his job description: the key and sounder were removed three years earlier. The new-fangled Motorola is the future of train control.
By 1960 Paso Robles, with its single overhead bulb burning in the dark, was the only fully-open, 24-hour train-order office remaining between Santa Margarita (which is north of San Luis Obispo and at the foot of the Cuesta grade) and King City. This is a distance of 75 miles.
What I remember is the understated manner with which Dale handled his duties while engaged in a great enterprise with all its dangers and opportunities to make consequential mistakes. Train-orders on single track were often about taking time from superior trains and lending it to inferior ones. Dale needed to transcribe his dispatcher’s orders quickly and with complete accuracy because as little as a typo would invalidate the order and stop a train. What’s more, that error would be magnified over distance causing further delays and recalculations up the line. No pressure then!
And Paso Robles’ annunciators gave minimal warning. How much ground did No. 99, the westbound Coast Daylight, cover in two-and-a-half minutes? The classic Hollywood films High Noon (Gary Cooper) and Suddenly (Frank Sinatra) drew on the dramatic potential in a rural California station like Paso Robles. Cue the ticking clock and the unseen inevitability of a fast-closing express.
The railroad will always be about time and distance
SP No. 98 the southbound (SP eastbound) Coast Daylight by the Pacific Ocean at Surf, California (between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara) in 1960, watched by the first-trick operator and his wife. With a clear order-board the engineer can power through in Run 8. (Patrick E. Kelly Collection)
It’s worth remembering that the railroad in those days didn’t run only on rails. It ran also on an invisible matrix with real people passing detailed computations of time and distance from one to another. And these computations were of great importance, since the railroad was literally the main line of commerce and communication.
Now I guess it’s only natural that the sight of my old friend at his operator’s desk sixty years ago will shout analog, even if many of us do find historical railroad technology important and interesting. But whether analog or digital, steam or turbocharged diesel-electric, the railroad will always be about time and distance. From this modest station and using comparatively primitive and manually-dependent communications, time was given and time taken away. How many people could put that in their job description?
My railroad adventure in the summer of 1969 was going very well indeed. I’d taken two weeks off from my Operator’s job on the New Haven, left NYC for Montreal, then the Canadian National Super Continental across Canada to Vancouver.
The trains were everything I had hoped transcontinental streamliners would be; clean, punctual, well-traveled with interesting people having a great time enjoying the vast expanses and stunning scenery that only train travel allowed you to fully appreciate.
Now it was time to head south from Vancouver, to Seattle, Portland, and on to San Francisco to meet my Air Force and railfan buddy who was returning from Vietnam for a month’s R&R. The west coast corridor between Vancouver and Portland had regular service with convenient schedules operated by several different railroads. In these pre-Amtrak years, most lines were struggling with the financial burden of ICC mandated passenger services that were losing business to air travel and Interstate highways. Train-off petitions kept the lawyers busy, but the operating departments, to their credit, tried to maintain a high level of service, since passenger trains were often the only contact between the public and the railroads. There was still a lot of pride in their important work.
The line in use at Sullivan’s Curve. Santa Fe’s Super C is overtaking helpers on an SP freight as both head toward the summit of Cajon Pass. Super C is eastbound by timetable direction, while the SP freight is westbound (heading toward San Francisco).
In 1966 and 1967, Southern Pacific provided a rare spectacle for me – construction of a brand-new main line.
In 1876, the railroad completed its San Joaquin Line from Central California over the Tehachapi Mountains to Los Angeles, then it proceeded to build the Sunset Route east toward El Paso and New Orleans. However, by the middle of the Twentieth Century, the Los Angeles area had become a bottleneck for traffic to the southeast, so SP planned a bypass. Read more
Completion of Southern Pacific’s San Joaquin line in 1876 was Los Angeles’ first rail connection to the rest of the country. It required a 6976 foot tunnel between the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys.
I photographed the west end of the tunnel (by timetable direction) on the afternoon of February 9, 1971. Why this date? Early that morning the 6.6 magnitude Sylmar Earthquake caused major damage in the area, killing 44 people. I drove up to see how the tunnel had held up, and the view through it correctly indicated there were no problems.
However, just past the far end of the tunnel, the interchanges of Interstate 5 with Interstate 210 and California Highway 14, then under construction, had collapsed on the tracks.
Sylmar, California – February 11, 1971
The railroad was back in service in a few days, but the highway bridges took over a year to rebuild, with strengthened columns.
History repeated itself in 1994 when the Northridge Earthquake again caused bridge collapses at the interchange. The road closures resulted in a major increase in Metrolink service on what was now their Antelope Valley Line, and this increased service remains today.
