San Antonio-Marshall, Texas
April 24, 2015

by David Ingles

After the conclusion of the AAPRCO meetings, on Thursday night/Friday morning some PVs left town on the Sunset Limited; our Cimarron River and Caritas were on the back of Amtrak #22, the Texas Eagle, on this Friday morning. Heritage unit 145, from our inbound special, was tacked onto the front of #2, the Sunset, for the run to New Orleans with several PVs on the rear. Our special’s trailing unit, 817, was our trailer on #22, behind P42 170, then the 7 regular Superliners, PV Sierra Hotel, and our 2 cars, with Caritas’s open rear platform facing rearward, of course. The Superliner consist, courtesy John Arbuckle: Dorm 39039, LAX-CHI sleeper, 32015, diner lite 37007,  Sightseer lounge 33014, coach-bag 31002, SAS-CHI coach 34000, and LAX-CHI coach 34058. We were scheduled out at 7 a.m., and I was up in time for it. But we on the close depot track were blocked by eastbound Sunset #2 on the adjacent (easterly) depot track. Its train was fouling our exit switch, already 25 minutes late for its departure. So we didn’t pull ahead until 7:21, #2 having backed up to let us out. It was still sitting in the depot, getting later by the minute, when we crossed over to the westward main track at 7:26 for the 1.7-mile reverse move to the Tower 112 junction; this move was made at track speed (maybe 20 mph or more?). We passed the old Lone Star Brewery twice, the second time as we pulled forward onto the ex-MKT main line as it diverges from the Sunset Route main. The is the normal procedure for the Texas Eagle to depart northward, in effect allowing it to make a big “loop” as it arrives from the north, lays overnight, and departs to the north. The first photo is to our rear, showing the 7 PVs on the back of the Sunset Limited; the AlamoDome arena is on the right. It’s a dark, cloudy and rainy morning; we look south by compass here, as the depot area is east of downtown on a brief north-south alignment of the Sunset Route main. The next photos are of train #2 parked at the depot, the SP steam engine on display between the tracks and the former SP depot (a presently closed restaurant, I believe called “Sunset Station” or some such), and two spare Superliners on a spur track. The tall building above the Superliners is the Staybridge Suites hotel, the AAPRCO meeting’s site. At the far left, next to the signal, are the two Sunset Route main tracks. We would cross over to the westward track to make the reverse move to Tower 112 junction, which took only 9 minutes.

Here’s the abandoned Lone Star Brewery near the Tower 112 site, as we head north a little after 8 a.m.

It being rainy, I next took to the platform after breakfast, up at New Braunfels, to photograph the diamond across the ex-MoPac main, at 8:50.

We crossed from the ex-MKT to the ex-MoPac at Conrads, MP 220.7, at 9 a.m. sharp, which actually gained me the serendipity of logging 15 new MKT miles, as on previous trips on #22 we’d crossed over at Ogden Jct., MP 235.9, and on the previous Tuesday, we’d gotten on the ex-MoPac north of here. In the first photo, we have just made our San Marcos station stop at the relatively recent Amtrak platform, arriving at 9:14 and leaving at 9:19, 47 minutes behind schedule.

Not far north of the “new” platform, the roofed structure at the right, closer to downtown San Marcos, is what remains of the Eagle’s earlier “temporary” stop, established when the city was added as a stop. There had been a gravel platform here, I believe.

Soon we passed Centex, where a connection from the ex-MKT joins the ex-MoPac, and immediately thereafter, the football stadium of Texas State University. Note that the sky has cleared somewhat, and we’ve outpaced the rain.

The next photos are as we crossed Texas’s own Colorado River approaching downtown Austin and then made a 90-degree left (past a former SP junction) to the former MoPac station (far left in the fourth photo), now surrounded by high-rises. We arrived at the depot at 10:04 and departed at 10:18, still down 47 minutes. (The said SP line now is truncated at the east side of downtown, and as its northwest branch – it also went due east – now hosts Austin’s DMU commuter trains, and outside the city from Cedar Park to Burnet, the Austin Steam Train’s excursion operation, which uses an Alco “Alligator” diesel now while its ex-SP 2-8-2 is under its 2nd restoration).

We were met during the depot stop by BNSF employee Neil Payton, who had ridden our cars from Albuquerque to San Antonio. Behind him is a daughter, who lives in Austin, that he was visiting. As at many stops, the PVs “did not make it to the platform.”

Leaving the depot the track gracefully curves from due west to due north and joins the median of the “MoPac Freeway” for about 5 miles. (Austin station is MP 179.1; you’ll notice Milepost 176 at the left in one photo.) Texas sure knows how to name its freeways, doesn’t it! And of course there is a Dallas north suburb called Frisco, home to the newly relocated (from the state fairgrounds) railroad museum and yes, on BNSF’s former Frisco line from Tulsa to Fort Worth!

Sneed siding is just north of where the track leaves the MoPac Freeway median (the road is, incidentally, Texas Highway 1), and waiting on it for us to pass at 10:27 a.m. was UP 5659 with five units.

Six miles farther north is McNeil, where, just to the south, we passed an aggregates train, UP 6184 North with three units, the last a “patched” SP, in a siding. Immediately thereafter we went under the commuter line overpass at McNeil, where if you look close, you’ll see the diamond with the old SP line, now the Austin Western, a Watco firm that runs daily freights and hauls a lot of aggregates, most if not all of which is interchanged with UP via the connecting track at the lower left. A government authority may own all or part of AWRR’s line, probably for sure the portion the DMUs operate on; the overpass of the UP is specifically for the DMUs only. Our time here: 10:33.

At Round Rock about 10 minutes later, we passed the Minor League baseball stadium for the Round Rock Express, the AAA affiliate of the Texas Rangers and partially owned by legendary pitcher Nolan Ryan. It surprised me, so no photo. The next shots were at Taylor, where the Eagle moves from ex-MoPac onto ex-Katy up to Opal, the intersection in Temple. An SP “patch” GE, 6187, was on a string of trilevels in the Taylor yard. (This reminds me of a San Antonio anecdote. I never saw it, but people on board the train swore they saw about three times, a local shuttle move on UP, likely between the ex-MP yard south of the city and an ex-SP yard northeast of downtown, the same trio of diesel units, the middle of which was a completely untouched Cotton Belt unit, prob a GP60, with no UP markings of any kind. No one had pictorial proof or an engine numbers – these are passenger guys, not diesel guys – but there can’t be many of those left.) We left Taylor at 11 a.m., 38 minutes late.

Up in Temple, as we changed routes at Opal under a highway bridge at 11:44, a BNSF northbound stack train off to the south, just out of the fuel-pad area, awaited our passage. I also present close-ups, of different angles than Monday’s passage, of the Temple museum’s rolling stock, followed by units in the vicinity of the Temple engine terminal, including one of the rare unpainted ex-EMD-leaser blue GP38s. I’d not before seen a BNSF GE in the “Heritage 1” scheme renumbered to the 500s. And I apologize if you’re getting tired of renumbered SD40-2s, but I’d hardly seen any before they had these “doomed” engine-number-series applied.

Clearing the depot at 11:56, only 31 minutes late thanks to the generous schedule-padding of the Eagle, we passed the 5608 North, a coal empty, at the end of the two-track section at 12:01. The big water tower has “Temple” on it.

Somewhere before McGregor, we passed under a rural “rainbow” bridge, which I associate with Illinois, Iowa, or Missouri much more than Texas. I made the shot from the rearmost lounge seat in Caritas on the engineer’s side, a spot in normal business cars often reserved for the railroad president. During our McGregor stop (not far west of Waco), I framed the local units (1645 and 1772, SD40-2s still in Santa Fe colors) with an Amtrak sign. The old Santa Fe depot, still in use (and which I’ve photographed before, was at the diamond crossing of the Cotton Belt branch west from Waco, for which SSW’s only Baldwin center-cab transfer diesel was bought, as the west-end-point terminus had no place to turn a diesel! We left McGregor at 12:37, back to 46 minutes late. Up at Cleburne, where our 2-minute stop concluded at 1:48, now 48 minutes late, I finally got a shot of its depot in its restored state.

At Birds siding, in Fort Worth’s south side, we passed BNSF 5063 South, a ballast train, at 2:12.

Soon into central and foggy Fort Worth, we halted south of Tower 55, first to let Amtrak #21, which had just departed the depot, to pass. As seen in the accompanying file of Amtrak’s Heritage units, and here below, it was led by #822. Off to the east a UP train waited, led by a patched C&NW GE. We passed the tower and curved into the depot, stopping at 2:23.

The Heartland Flyer’s consist normally lays over at the depot, and it was a nice surprise to see the red-nose Heritage unit, 156, on the north end; the south-end unit was 117, and NPCU (ex-F40 control cab, or “non-powered control unit”) 90222 was also on hand. Behind 90222 sat a spare Superliner coach. We unloaded and loaded passengers, then at 2:47 backed up to water the private cars, leaving that spot at 2:56.

We waited to back out past Tower 55 from 2:58 until 3:08, then backed down to the south, getting a better look at the freight led by the ex-C&NW “patch” unit, 6726. Finally we proceeded around the southeast connection onto the ex-T&P main, clearing East Tower 55 interlocking at 3:18, vs. a scheduled Fort Worth depot departure time of 2:20.

Rumors of the Eagle using Trinity Rail Express’s ex-Rock Island line between Fort Smith and Dallas proved false, at least this day, and we had an expedient trip over to “Big D” on the old T&P, crossing the long Trinity River trestle south of downtown and curving into Union Terminal at 3:58. During our depot stop, which ended at 4:07 as we left 27 minutes late, we saw 3 DART light-rail trains, including a meet of 2, and as we left, an eastbound TRE commuter train was arriving behind us. In the first light-rail photo, the infamous former Texas Schoolbook Depository building is above the 2nd car from the right. In the 2nd light-rail photo, I’ve cropped in close to better, I hope, distinguish between the 2 passing trains. The TRE train never got any closer as we began to move.

As we left central Dallas, we passed a waiting UP freight, 4095 East, while off to the north, at right, a local job of Genesee & Wyoming’s local affiliate, the “DGNO -- or Dig-No, Dallas, Garland & Northeastern, was busy switching. I made 2 photos; the close-up of the DGNO is just a huge crop of one of the others.

Proceeding on east and having passed 5 trains, we stopped at Mineola at 5:39 for 3 minutes, leaving at 5:42, 27 minutes behind schedule. I’d photographed the depot when riding #21, but thought I’d try again. Then it was time for dinner, so I took the photo of the table in Caritas ready for service.

Having passed 2 more trains, we made our Longview stop from 6:30 to 6:39, during dinner, leaving 24 minutes late. At Marshall, a crew change point with built in schedule padding, we arrived west of the depot at 7:05 and sat for 6 minutes, moving up at 7:11 and then holding 20 minutes for an on-time departure. An eastbound freight we had passed eased up and around us, and I made what turned out to be my last 3 photos of the trip, of the train passing us (thru Cartias’s windows), and then the restored T&P depot, inside a wye, as we pulled out.

As we passed thru Atlanta, Texas, after dark at 8:15, I noted it has a nicely restored depot that needs to be photographed. I stayed up past Texarkana, where our stop was 8:43 to 8:49 and we left 6 minutes late, but we took more minor delays as we operated under an “FF” protocol, standing for flash flood watch, as we were moving thru a front with heavy thunderstorms. The lightning strikes put on quite the show, but we passed a spot where the stack train that passed us at Marshall reported he’d split thru a tree down across the track, without our noticeably slowing down. We left Hope, hometown of ex-President Bill Clinton and whose depot is restored but fenced, at 930, 12 minutes late. Next morning, we arrived St. Louis on-time at 7:19. The Cimarron River lives in St. Louis and so would be uncoupled from the train. Caritas would go on to Chicago on a later Lincoln train, because had it been moved and recoupled behind  the Sierra Hotel to stay on the rear, it would have incurred an Amtrak switching charge. So Otto and I, and a couple of other AAPRCO passengers also going on to Chicago, moved up to the Superliners at St. Louis. A few other thru passengers stayed on the Caritas, as they were overnighting in Chicago. But Otto and I wanted to make a Hiawatha connection home. Our trip up thru Illinois was under foggy skies with lots of water standing around. Though we left St. Louis on-time at 8:05, we were 16 minutes late out of Alton, 20 minutes thru the flag stop of Carlinville with no passengers handled and no real stop, 24 minutes late out of a double-stop at Springfield, the same out of Lincoln, and 23 late out of Normal. Lincoln train 303 passed us as we made a 6-minute halt in the siding at Ballard (and we believe Heritage unit 66 was 303’s rear unit). We were 36 minutes down out of Pontiac, and stopped at the Global 4 control point south of Joliet for 9 minutes getting permission to enter Joliet. All signals thru the Joliet interlocking were out of service as signal crews converted the plant for remote control, as UD Tower by the old Union Station (Metra Rock Island crossing) would close on May 2nd. By the time we crept thru Joliet interlocking, it was 1:19 and despite padding we still were 23 minutes late. (BTW, the “temporary” Amtrak platform north of the old tower is a “joke” whose story is too long for this tale, especially at its end.) We stopped at Chicago Union Station at 2:28, and Otto and I easily made Hiawatha #337 at 3:15 p.m. Metra was single-tracking for trackwork north of Glenview, so we waited for an inbound Metra and wound up about 20 minutes late on north. Carol picked us up at the Airport Station in Milwaukee, around 5 p.m., so we stopped for supper en route to Waukesha before dropping Otto off at home and then crossing town to our house. The gloomy weather this Saturday could not dampen the entire 9-day odyssey. Thank you for your attention.

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