The New Transcontinental Race

[mersenne6]

According to my local newspaper BNSF and UP are racing to double track from L.A. to Chicago and BNSF is way out in front. The article briefly mentioned the machines and the people involved and, in light of the fact that there are no known surviving first person accounts (written by the men who did the day-to-day work) of the building of the First Transcontinental, does anyone know of any weblogs, articles, etc. written by some member of the current double tracking workforce?

The description of the track laying machinery and the problems surrounding the current double tracking effort sound very interesting and, being a real fan of first person accounts, I would be very interested in reading a first person account about this effort.

[gabe]

Trains Magazine's most recent story concerning UP's latest problems and solutions to those problems seemed to indicated that UP was content to lose this "race" and are content in being #2 to L.A. because there is enough business to be very profitable even at #2 in this corridor.

Gabe

[mudchicken]

The article is clearly a groaner[xx(][xx(], written (pasted together?) by someone trained by cross-town New York Times[}:)][:(]...rah-rah for investors maybe, but also comically inaccurate (anyone know what a P8-11 is? - They called it something else, and boy are they clueless as is most of the general public)...General Dodge, General Palmer, Theodore Judah & AA Robinson (and a few others) are rolling over in their graves!

mersenne6 - ATSF started attempting to program doubletrack the bottleneck in its system long ago, Krebs & Haverty cranked-up the ongoing process (dated enough yet?) and it continues as funds become available. After the merger(BNSF), there was more than a little grumbling in the ranks that $$$$ spent on the transcon should have been spent elsewhere first. It's all about managing capacity and covering the cost of your investment. UP has two/three ways into southern and central CA already. BNSF has the ATSF transcon which historically has been a gem that consistently was well invested-in while UP, SP & WP have (Especially SP) have lagged somewhat behind. - And the old UP was no slouch.

[banghead][banghead][banghead][banghead]

[daveklepper]

The UP's equivalent to the BNSF's Transcon is the Central Corridor where the UP is tops and part has already been triple tracked, and there is already double track or better all the way from Chicago to Oakland, CA. (Note that crossing the Sierras the UP has both the SP and WP lines.) With all the high density on the SF's Transcon, and even adding the little freight that moves via Alberquerque and Raton, which is now pretty much overflow and Amtrak, you'll find the density between Green River and Cheyenne about 40% greater than the maximum on the Transcon. So if the UP is 2nd to Southern California, it still is probably 1st totalling everything Chicago to West Coast.

[eastside]

If you want the source WSJ article, drop me a line. Apparently, even remote places, such as Abo Canyon, have their Nimbys.

[mersenne6]

Thanks for the response. Obviously the article was overdone with respect to the assertions concerning "a race", however, race or not, the effort involved in an undertaking of this type still sounds interesting so the question I asked still stands - does anyone know of any first person accounts of this work?

[mersenne6]

I'm looking for first person accounts from the standpoint of the tracklayer. I've read about 80 such books and I have about 60 more in the library that will get read someday. The reason I asked about this particular undertaking and the reason I'm sort of hopeful someone at the track gang level may have written something is because, for whatever reason, there has been a delightful spate of such books published within the last couple of years. For example:

Unauthorized Train Stories - Amtrak conductor
Ten Turtles to Tucumcari - Railway express agent
That Reminds me of Another Story - engineer
Gandydancer's Children - son of a gandydancer
Off the Street - Amtrak Conductor
Westsider - Railroad brakeman
Terminal Tales - roundhouse foreman
etc.

All were penned by people doing the day-to-day work and all are about the day-to-day work.