Lucky Find
US Lime SW14 #1200 or #100009, can't tell with all the letters and numbers under the cab, shoves a cut of loaded lime cars across the bridge over Sallisaw Creek and down to interchange with the KCS in Marble City Oklahoma.
This obscure operation just happen to be down at the Marble City interchange picking up empties left by the KCS while we were in town. Once they tied onto their empties they pulled those back to their facility about 1.5 miles from the KCS interchange. Not long after they arrived at their facility they shoved loads back down to the interchange, before returning to their facility. A serious stroke of luck on an operation that has virtually no coverage and doesn't seem to interchange a lot of traffic with KCS.
This bridge seemed a bit to heavy duty for the volume of traffic on this small branch line, at first glance. And after some research its appears this bridge, or at least the main span, appears to be from an abandoned branch line from Spiro Oklahoma, to Fort Smith Arkansas. When that line was abandoned sometime around 1943 that bridge got moved here.
Now for the locomotive. From the research I've been able to gather this locomotive was built in July of 1951 as IC SW9 # 9455, it then went to the ICG and was rebuilt as a SW14 and given the new number of 1412. After this locomotive left the ICG it appears to have bounced around a few other locations and railroads before finding it's way to the Ventura County Railroad (VCRR), a 13 mile industrial railroad around Port Hueneme in Oxnard California. The VCRR was part of the Rail America conglomerate which is where this locomotive got it's Red, White, and Blue scheme from. Once Rail America was sold to the Genesee and Wyoming (G&W) this locomotive got shipped out and sold, winding up on this 1.5 mile stretch of obscure industrial railroad in woods of Eastern Oklahoma.
Lucky Find
US Lime SW14 #1200 or #100009, can't tell with all the letters and numbers under the cab, shoves a cut of loaded lime cars across the bridge over Sallisaw Creek and down to interchange with the KCS in Marble City Oklahoma.
This obscure operation just happen to be down at the Marble City interchange picking up empties left by the KCS while we were in town. Once they tied onto their empties they pulled those back to their facility about 1.5 miles from the KCS interchange. Not long after they arrived at their facility they shoved loads back down to the interchange, before returning to their facility. A serious stroke of luck on an operation that has virtually no coverage and doesn't seem to interchange a lot of traffic with KCS.
This bridge seemed a bit to heavy duty for the volume of traffic on this small branch line, at first glance. And after some research its appears this bridge, or at least the main span, appears to be from an abandoned branch line from Spiro Oklahoma, to Fort Smith Arkansas. When that line was abandoned sometime around 1943 that bridge got moved here.
Now for the locomotive. From the research I've been able to gather this locomotive was built in July of 1951 as IC SW9 # 9455, it then went to the ICG and was rebuilt as a SW14 and given the new number of 1412. After this locomotive left the ICG it appears to have bounced around a few other locations and railroads before finding it's way to the Ventura County Railroad (VCRR), a 13 mile industrial railroad around Port Hueneme in Oxnard California. The VCRR was part of the Rail America conglomerate which is where this locomotive got it's Red, White, and Blue scheme from. Once Rail America was sold to the Genesee and Wyoming (G&W) this locomotive got shipped out and sold, winding up on this 1.5 mile stretch of obscure industrial railroad in woods of Eastern Oklahoma.