Albuquerque–Lubbock
April 19, 2015

by David Ingles

With its 10 PVs assembled during the night, the AAPRCO “Texas Special” set off for Lubbock, Texas, at 8 a.m. with this consist (car initials are for color / lettering scheme, not necessarily origin): P42 145, P40 817, SP Birch Grove, L&N Oliver Hazard Perry, MKT J. Pinckney Henderson, SLSF Cimarron River, IC Caritas, CB&Q Sierra Hotel, Pullman Berlin, Deering, CB&Q Silver Iris, NYC Dagny Taggart. As we left ABQ, I photographed the depot, then five hot air balloons over Herzog ballast cars, and some units at BNSF’s ABQ engine terminal. The city is known for hot air balloon flying, with clear air, high altitude, and many sunny days; there is at least one big festival for them, and this was an ideal WX day for flying them.

We sat at East Isleta for 9 minutes at 8:29 to let northbound Rail Runner 702, with engine 105, pass, and slowly moved thru Belen Jct., 30 miles from the ABQ station, at 8:58 as a westbound was just leaving town, with DPU Citirail 1403 as a single DPU. Per normal operating practice, we “kept to the left” and went straight thru the yard to the south end, where we halted at 9:06 for 46 minutes “awaiting our slot.” As we passed thru the yard, I made several photos, of the old Harvey House (now a museum), the depot (much modified, now a yard office), and some interesting BNSF units.

This first photo shows two westbounds at the w.b. fuel rack/crew-change point, with one of numerous SD40-2s now in yard service at the left. All have been renumbered to below 2000 to accommodate all the new GEs BNSF has been buying. The white lettering below the number indicates the likelihood of remote-control operation.

Cascade green SD60Ms are still, or are back, in service, also renumbered down to the “short life expectancy” series. The pair in the one photo, 1457/1472, was on the Belen-ABQ shuttle freight on Saturday, ready to leave north when we shot the Rail Runner, but was under the street bridge and didn’t budge, so we went to lunch without a shot of it. And how about 5 BNSF color schemes in one photo? A Citirail 1400 was just off to the left, to boot! BNSF 8440 was trailing as part of a two-unit DPU on an eastbound that left before we did.

Finally at close to 10 a.m. we began moving again, passing two eastbounds ready to follow us. Note the one at left has an NS as trailing unit. Soon after we left the yard we passed two westbounds, one of which went unphotographed but with a BNSF orange /CP red/Warbonnet trio. Off-line units are few and far between out here. By 9:56 we were clear of the yard and across the Rio Grande, headed for Abo Canyon.

Running left-handed, as we approached Abo Canyon, where BNSF spent millions moving mountains to create two main tracks thru the brief geological interruption in their Trainscon, we spotted our fourth westbound, and I made what I do say is a “remarkable movielike sequence” of photos of the “meet,” with each of our progress being “perfect” to show the bridge and miss a rock outcropping in between the mains. The bridge this train is crossing is new, the westernmost “evidence” of the huge Abo Canyon construction project. We were thru the canyon and under the U.S. 60 bridge just east of it at 10:22.

We went around an eastbound at Pedernal at 11:17 and had “met” 8 westbounds by the time we approached the ex-SP overpass just west of Vaughn. This has been a Transcon single-track bottleneck, but it is being fixed by building a second bridge over the UP; several photos show the new second main under construction and the bridge site, at 11:41 a.m., including the first photo from the lunch table, from which I excused myself to go to Caritas’s platform for photos. The view down the former SP looks southwest.

The next series of photos I made was at Clovis, where we stopped by the old depot to change crews at 3:37 p.m, having “met” an astounding 22 more trains in the 130 miles, and 4 hours, since Vaughn. Being mid-train at high speed told me photography wasn’t worth it, having had such good luck trackside the day before. We’d pass at least 5 more trains between the Clovis depot and Texico, where our “new mileage” began as we left the Transcon to head southeast toward Lubbock for overnight. The last photo shows the Transcon’s two main tracks curving northeast as we prepare to diverge to the right, changing our watches back to Central Time at 4:21p,m.

We met one train, in the siding for us, at Lariat at 5:33, then took siding ourselves at Littlefield at 5:31 for the 7941 West, a stack train which passed us at 6:42. We were on the way again at 6:46 for a 55-mph run to Lubbock, with our Amtrak crew from ABQ “outlawing” at 7:30. A supervisor took us the last couple of miles and, after passing the “engine area” at the yard, where I snapped a photo of a yard-engine pair (that’s the shadow of the dome on Sierra Hotel, behind the Caritas, showing in the photo, we arrived at the modern Lubbock yard office, near the old depot site, at 7:42, where I took a shot of the setting sun. Soon we were parked on a yard track for the night, having added 90 new “Santa Fe” miles.

This page was designed and is maintained by Mike Condren. If you have materials
that you would like to contribute, contact me at mcondren@cbu.edu