Lubbock–Houston
April 20, 2015

by David Ingles

Monday was scheduled to be an early departure from the Lubbock Yard, and I’m told we pulled at 6:14 a.m, made the main at 6:21, and cleared yard limits at 6:28. I slept in, not getting up and going until beyond Dermott, MP 747, 70-plus miles out of Lubbock, at 7:55. The first place of importance was Sweetwater, where we stopped at 8:44 at the 1950s passenger station north of the city, for a 13-minute crew change (I think), pulling out at 8:57.

East of Sweetwater, our ex-Santa Fe line, the Lampass Sub, goes over UP’s Baird Sub, the ex-Texas & Pacific main (Ft. Worth–El Paso). Five miles west of that bridge, at a point called Tecific, there is an interchange connection (pictured), which we passed at 9:06. I believe it is not heavily used, but BNSF has rights from here into Fort Worth stemming from one of the big 1990s mergers.

New mileage for me this day would be from Lubbock to Temple, with the exception of 30 miles between junctions with this line: San Angelo Jct. at MP 373.5 and Ricker, a siding just east of Brownwood at MP 343. I covered this segment of the Lampass Sub in February 1995 on what was then the South Orient Railroad, a short line. This was a deadhead move of Copper Canyon train equipment, sold to the public (we dined upstairs in a dome car) from Fort Worth to eventually Presidio, with overnights at San Angelo and near Alpine, which netted me 540 new “Santa Fe” miles (my base year in 1963 for ownership), Today, plus yesterday from Texico to Lubbock, I’d gain 422 new miles, very very hard to do anymore. We passed the preserved depot in downtown Brownwood at 11:17.

Just beyond, I spotted the depot moved from Kress in a park, near other preserved rail equipment, and then in crossing to the south side Dutch door saw that we were passing the BNSF yard, where I snapped a few more frames. The 4-unit GE consist pictured has a CP unit at the west end and a CN unit at the east end, with two BNSFs in the middle. East of Brownwood we ran thru a bit of scenery, perhaps an extreme north end of Texas’s “Hill Country,” the heart of which is west and northwest of Austin. Lampass itself was passed at 12:49, after lunch, and we saw no train activity on this line, so I contented myself with watching, not photographing.

After passing Fort Hood at 1:22, and glimpsing its red locomotive off to the north by their shop, including one Genset, then Killeen soon after, we sped onward to the outskirts of Temple at 2 p.m. As we approached the enginehouse amidst the wye north of the depot, which is an Amtrak stop for the “Texas Eagle,” I shot a few units and was surprised that we slowly cruised right past the depot, at 2:02, and segued briefly onto the Eagle’s route to Opal, the diamond crossing with UP’s ex-Katy main line, where the southbound Eagle changes from old Santa Fe to old Katy. As we passed by, I snapped a few shots of the Temple Railroad Museum equipment outside the depot.

We pulled right thru Temple to what I’d call BNSF’s apparently fairly new fuel pad area south of the city, for a crew change and to drop passenger John Arbuckle, who’d ridden with us one day from Lubbock, him being a hard-core Santa Fe fan with a mileage “gap” between Lubbock and San Angelo Jct. His brother was coming up from Austin to pick him up from our train. I missed good arriving shots of two northbounds at the north fuel pad, one with a Warbonnet trailing and the other, pictured a CSX unit in the consist. After almost 45 minutes, we left the Temple area at 2:57 p.m., passing the stopped 7347 South at the south fuel pad.

At Caldwell, at MP 160, 46 miles south of the fuel pad, we ran thru the passing siding to overtake a stack train, 7457/4417/6748 South, at 4:11 p.m. Twenty miles farther, at Somerville, we curved effortlessly from the north-south Galveston Sub onto the east-west Conroe Sub at 4:32 and proceeded east.

At Navasota at 5:10, we curved (first photo) and crossed UP’s Eureka Sub (second photo) and then paralleled its Navasota Sub. Three miles later, at 5:16, we met BNSF 8227 West at Wood siding, then 9 miles later, at 5:33, we passed over the Navasota Sub. There is no BNSF-UP connection at either place. We reached Dobbin at 5:45 and curved south (third photo) onto the Houston Sub, the former Burlington-Rock Island Railroad linking Dallas and Houston, jointly owned by those two “Fallen Flags.” We were following a relatively recent “through route” for BNSF. (The fourth photo looks north past the Conroe Sub diamond on the old B-RI. In April 2005, I and others on board this AAPRCO train had ridden a High Iron Travel special on these same two cars from Somerville east to Silsbee (straight ahead at Dobbin), then north to Longview, Texas, gaining 340 old Santa Fe miles on what was then BNSF at each end, but short line Timber Rock Railroad, a Watco property, on the 131 miles between Silsbee and Tenaha, Texas. Those were different days a decade ago, as from Tenaha to Longview, our PVs were on the back of the daily BNSF freight as a “mixed,” and our cars were set out right by the UP/Amtrak Longview station!

The 48 miles into Houston on the old B-RI, speed limit 40, were new miles for most of us. As we got into Houston, the sky clouded up, so Dobbin was the site of my last photos for the day. At Casey siding, MP 70, we passed a train with a Genset locomotive at 6:47. We left B-RI for former SP trackage at Houston’s Belt Jct., MP 57 on the old B-RI (from Galveston, I assume) at 7:15. We turned west at Maury St. onto former SP, then made an efficient back-up see-saw move at Tower 26 from 7:35 to 7:40 in order to proceed on to the Amtrak Houston station (ex-SP), where we tied up at 7:45. Later on, I watched from my roomette window as a late Sunset Limited rolled in from New Orleans, with only 5 Superliners. It’d taken a day and a half, but we had angled down across the Lone Star State, taking 930 miles from Texico (Clovis, N.Mex.) to Houston to do it!

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