High and dry with the Hualapai: Following the Transcon along Route 66

This is a love note to the Hualapai Lodge in Peach Springs, Ariz., the BNSF Transcon line that runs through town, and the unspoiled surrounding real estate — as fine a spot as you can find to watch the Big Show where the trains run on 15-minute headways on a first class double-track, CTC-signaled railroad mostly laid with concrete ties. The locomotives are clean and quiet. The weather is generally cloudless and the air is dry and crisp. The resulting light is a tad contrasty, but it’s constant and a welcome break from the gray northeast where I live.

Yeah, it’s dry. The southeastern part of the country is in a major drought and finding running water in a stream is next to impossible. Driving on a dirt road will coat your car in a fine dust inside and out. It’ll work its way into your clothes and you’ll taste it. But no matter. This is a place to watch trains and a minor inconvenience like dust is to be largely ignored. You can always clean up later.

As long as you keep your equipment covered when you’re not using it, you’ll be fine. But drink, drink, drink. You need to keep a lot of water in you.

My friend Ivan Abrams and I were there largely because of a couple of maps I did recently, one for the “Trains of the 1940s” special issue that has a story on the Santa Fe in wartime, and one for a story on the ATSF Crookton Cutoff in the Winter 2014 issue of Classic Trains. Working on the FT Map of the Month for Trains, I was also fascinated by the account of the FT diesels taking over this line from Winslow, Ariz., to Barstow, Calif. in World War II. Then there was Fred Frailey’s classic “Twenty-four hours at Supai Summit” in the September 1996 issue of Trains, and the BNSF traffic density Map of the Month in the January 2014 issue that showed 69 trains a day between Ash Fork and Needles. I was pumped up and rarin’ to go.

We had been in the area last year (Ivan lives in Tucson) and doing the maps whetted my appetite for going back. As an added bonus, I had never spent any time on old Route 66, which runs pretty much unsullied from Seligman to Kingman through Peach Springs. The Hualapai Indian Tribe (pronounced WAH-la-pie), you may recall, are the folks who built the Skywalk out over the Grand Canyon. Their Lodge in Peach Springs looked like a great place to stay. A trip was born.

After meeting Ivan at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix (Phoenix is proof to me that Arizona is generally uninhabitable) and a drive up the Interstate to Flagstaff, we struck out the next morning for Diablo Canyon. After making a wrong turn, we never did find the canyon, but did shoot a nice stone arch bridge just west of it.

Saw three roadrunners, though. Of course, there were boxes lying all around from the Acme Rocket Sled Co., and yes, the roadrunners stuck their tongues out at us and went “beep beep.”

Even though Ivan has a four-wheel drive, the roads in that area are wretched at best and the rocks are sharp. No point in shredding four-day-old tires or gouging the oil pan, especially out there, so we missed the canyon. We headed back west to Walnut Canyon Exit on I-40 to what has become one of my favorite spots on earth. Morning light for eastbounds borders on perfect. We had spent the better part of a day and a half there last year and were fine with spending the rest of the morning back there again.

We bypassed Flagstaff, going west for lunch in Williams. Home of the Grand Canyon Railroad, Williams is a tourist trap of the first rank with Route 66, Old West, Grand Canyon and train kitsch everywhere. It also introduced us to a local phenomenon of displaying dead fire trucks. Seems every town out there has to have at least two.

Now on Route 66, we stopped at Crookton, west end of Santa Fe’s 44-mile Crookton Cutoff which, in 1960, eliminated 3,200 degrees of curvature and reduced the ruling grade to 1 percent, eliminating an operating bottleneck at a cost of $20 million.

Crookton is deserted, but the old Route 66 bridge west of there is a fine place to shoot from. Then we were off to Pica, where there are still steam-era water tanks (which is amazing, considering the line was mostly dieselized in World War II) and a set of crossovers. We met a trainmaster who said we were fine as long as we didn’t get too close to the tracks.  With trains going by at 60 or better, we weren’t all that inclined to do that anyway.

 Granted, this was during the pre-Christmas rush, so the bulk of the traffic was solid double-stack containers interspersed with unit auto rack trains, trainloads of trailers, oil and ethanol, manifest and unit grain trains. (See Fred Frailey’s recent blog “Two Transcons, by the numbers.”)

We noticed that compared to last year, there were far fewer trains with Distributed Power Units. Last year one or two DPUs on almost every train were the norm. A fair number of Citirail lease units were also in attendance this year.

Off to Kingman where we spent the night, then a slow trip back to Peach Springs the next day. We looked at the well-preserved Santa Fe 4-8-4 3759 in Kingman. I was amused by its silly little trailing truck that looked like it was made by Lionel.

We did a fine shot from the Hualapai Mountain Road bridge right in Kingman that looks like you’re way the hell out in the middle of nowhere but really you’re surrounded by city. More specifically, house trailers perched on the side of cliffs. The Kingman depot is also a jewel and well lit all day.

We moseyed back east, taking a look at the stored jet airliners at the Kingman airport, and then got serious about the Transcon. Back east up 66 on the wrong (north) side of the tracks, we didn’t hit anything good till around Hackberry, but then did quite nicely at a couple of public crossings.

We checked in to the Hualapai Lodge and were immediately impressed. Nicely designed, good food in the restaurant (try the stew and the fry bread with local honey), and a room with a bed where I tossed and turned for almost 15 seconds before I fell into a sleep I can only describe as delicious. It was that good.

Next day we went east of Peach Springs and fell back into what was now the daily routine. Find a spot. Shoot three or four trains. Find next spot. Repeat until lunch at the lodge about two miles away. Repeat in the afternoon. Return at dark to a shower where the dust-laden water coming off you looks like the muddy Mississippi running through the delta. Have a nice dinner. And back to that fantastic bed.

Last day photographing we worked our way back to Flagstaff, then next morning back to the hell of Phoenix and the flight home.

During the trip, I asked just about every Arizonan I met what they did for water.

Them: “We get it out of the Colorado.”

Me: “And you know the Colorado’s going down?”

“Well, yeah,” they say assuming a beatific smile and taking a sudden notice in the sky or ceiling as the case may be, “but it’s warm here.”

So Arizona weather’s hot and the train watching’s really hot with plenty of traffic and scenery, but it’s still (wait for it) a dry heat.