Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Saw something strange today

If they can hold on [b][color:#3333FF]just a little longer...[/color][/b]

Off topic, but I was once hunting Gambles quail in Southern Nevada in a way back remote corner of the desert. A massive coal train fully loaded was passing on the tracks. The engine was about a quarter mile past me when the entire train emergency braked. It was one of the loudest craziest things I ever saw. Never found out what the problem was.

I don't think that the UP stores any engines or cars - they just keep running them back and forth through town when I am out walking and need to cross the tracks.

i have a long relationship with the santa fe. try about 80 years of service between my father and grandfather, into territorial times in arizona. A high school friend works for santa fe in yuma, often takes video of the different engines running through there.
as a kid i use to get to sit in the engineers lap and drive those engines. Would never be allowed today, but at the time i kind of had the run of them.

Those have been there for at least a year. Used to fly over them going between Douglas and Tucson.

The line finally got long enough to see them from I-10. Most likely will go under I-10 and continue to the north if they keep parking them there.

On this same trip, somewhere between Texarkana and Wichita Falls, I saw a junk yard that had at least 20 cabooses in it. miles

Steady flow of trains, coal and otherwise, going past here...

Ha... I was in Madison, WI yesterday... Strange town indeed. Wife was in a grocery store and witnessed 2 men with a child. One of the guys was admonishing the child to call the other guy "mommy"...

Just as well I didn't see that...

Sorry for the hijack but this was a thread about "something strange"...

How long has it been since they used cabooses?

Should the plural of caboose just be caboose, as in moose, or should it be cabeese as in geese?

Could be just old used up engines. Park them in AZ. until a 3rd world country buys them. GE did build a new factory in Fort Worth last year to build engines. I'm sure GE had a few contracts to build before they put in the factory. We have a little RR headquarters located here.

^This.

Before the fall of 2008, all of those locomotives were running 24/7. Immediately after, even more of them went into storage. They've been gradually returning to service, by fits and starts, ever since. The only EPA compliance retrofitting I am aware of is for locos working in Calif.

UP locomotives (almost all of them now) have autostart devices that kick in before the coolant (no antifreeze, as another poster mentioned) is in danger of freezing. They shut themselves back down once they are warmed up, unless actually in use. These long term stored locomotives are dead and drained though. Doesn't take that much to get them up and running when business demands, but there are tax implications to account for that effect how quickly the decision is made to do so.

The price of a new locomotive is too great to just scrap them because they're old. Most of the locomotives I see stored are still quite useful, although lacking some of the technology that would allow them to be a controlling (lead) locomotive.

O

We replaced cabooses on freight trains with rear end telemetry devices in the late eighties. IIRC, that was all but complete by about '90.

Miles, those engines are parked just a few miles west of where I live. They have been there a couple years. Good friend of mine is retired from the railroad and was an engineer out of Tucson. According to him, ctsmith nailed it. Decline in the coal industry and lackluster economy in general.

When you see CCCC this weekend ask him about them. He comes through here quite often.

The tracks used to run north of the interstate, cross over the interstate to the south side at Marsh Station Road, make a loop and cross back over the interstate at Empirita Road. The underpass at Marsh Station was low clearance and narrow. Couple years ago they moved the Marsh Station Exit about a mile east the tracks stayed north of the interstate. UP uses that old loop to store locomotives. Like ctsmith said, about 300 of them at $2mil a piece.

How many locomotives does a NG pipeline need?

Sycamore

Kind of irrelevant, since pipelines don't go everywhere. But we don't need to get rid of the EPA for energy business to increase. China's economy is going to have to recover for coal shipments to get back up to what they were. Or some other third world country kick in.

This sounds like you will not be attending. Sorry about not getting to see you. miles

When I worked for Southern Pacific RR, our conductors called the devices DFD's...

Dumb F'n Devices... because they took away a person's job and reduced the size of train crew's.

I've seen the same thing in Grand Junction, hundreds of engines just sitting.

Miles, just go a little further west on I10 and turn right toward Tucson at Kolb - you will then see a host of stored airplanes parked neatly in row after row. Some great memories parked there. If you like older airplanes and their history, visit the Pima Air Museum there on the SE side of the Old Pueblo - well worth the time.

For whomever asked, some authority told me the proper plural for caboose is "cabooses" if it's two and "cabeese" if three or more. Saw three big cabeese together waddling through a grocery in Alb a while back - side to side they wouldn't fit across the aisle.