TheQuietStormKing
Extra Credit
Complete your assigned tasks ahead of schedule and your reward is often another switch list, a classic railroaders lament... On this particular August afternoon in 2018 we had brought a Q train down from Steven’s Point to Shops in well under the advertised, to no ones surprise the crew room printer fired up and began spitting out lists almost immediately upon our arrival. Great... Double up a couple tracks to build M336 and shove it up the outside lead, simple enough. Hmmm, what’s this? Head pin shows car DL 7222, that’s odd. DL would be Delaware Lackawanna, the Alco road out east, don’t think I’ve ever seen any of their cars around. Four digit number, not unheard of but strange. Wait a minute! Sure enough my suspicions bore fruit as the mundane numbers on the “extra credit” switch list came to life pulling up along side the motley assortment of locomotives cobbled together to power the daily “everything but the bathroom sink” manifest from Fond du Lac to Kirk Yard. This train has a notoriously miserable consist of mismarshalled way freight garbage assembled from across the upper Midwest, “bring me your tired third-hand papermill boxes, your worn out busted ass cushioning unit coil gons and your dog vomit miscellaneous crap freight”. I swear if modern day Shops Yard had a Statue of Liberty this would be her motto. This flagship of doom train often rated a losers lunch of power, if it had reasonably round wheels and could produce power enough to make it chicago (ie so long as it could make it out of the yard) it qualified for the head end of the lashup, a funeral of dead and dying patients often followed. Today’s power consists of two DC GE’s, on being a much detested barn, an sd70m-2 that has thrown a power assembly through the carbody with lube oil still seeping out along the carbody, another ill fated M-2 that had some manner of road failure and the ex Erie Mining C420 7222. The forlorn Alco had spent a number of years in seclusion on the Mineral Range, sadly never seeing service. She had been sold to the Delaware Lackawanna for parts, many of which had been stuffed in her carbody and nose, unlikely to ever see revenue operation again. I have an odd relationship with the Erie Mining, a poorly informed, poorly planned and heavily THC influenced laden solo trip to the northland yielded several now lost rolls of film documenting multiple failed attempts to capture the Erie operations. Don’t do drugs and railfan kids, bad things happen... Anyways, coming across this exceedingly rare remnant of those crazy lost days was one of those moments when the circle comes together. I’m eternally saddened to have botched my one opportunity to witness the Erie in action but at the time figured I’d return armed with more intel and experience. Instead, girls, school and work intervened (among other things). I went off to Arizona for school and by the time I returned to the Midwest the Erie Mining was all but dead. I look back on these days with nostalgia and regret, glad to have at least had a taste of what once was while burdened by the knowledge I had nothing tangible to show for it. Nowadays I make my living doing the thing I once chased as a childhood dream, not so ironically I do so only a few dozen miles from where I blundered my one chance to witness what would remain among my favored roads. Today I drive my young girls up the shore past the overgrown remains of Taconite Harbor on the way to family adventures, every single time a youthful part of me awakens and shakes his sardonic 90’s punk rocker head at me cursing our failures yet applauding our present dat successes. It’s an odd journey we’re on my friends.... an odd journey indeed.
Extra Credit
Complete your assigned tasks ahead of schedule and your reward is often another switch list, a classic railroaders lament... On this particular August afternoon in 2018 we had brought a Q train down from Steven’s Point to Shops in well under the advertised, to no ones surprise the crew room printer fired up and began spitting out lists almost immediately upon our arrival. Great... Double up a couple tracks to build M336 and shove it up the outside lead, simple enough. Hmmm, what’s this? Head pin shows car DL 7222, that’s odd. DL would be Delaware Lackawanna, the Alco road out east, don’t think I’ve ever seen any of their cars around. Four digit number, not unheard of but strange. Wait a minute! Sure enough my suspicions bore fruit as the mundane numbers on the “extra credit” switch list came to life pulling up along side the motley assortment of locomotives cobbled together to power the daily “everything but the bathroom sink” manifest from Fond du Lac to Kirk Yard. This train has a notoriously miserable consist of mismarshalled way freight garbage assembled from across the upper Midwest, “bring me your tired third-hand papermill boxes, your worn out busted ass cushioning unit coil gons and your dog vomit miscellaneous crap freight”. I swear if modern day Shops Yard had a Statue of Liberty this would be her motto. This flagship of doom train often rated a losers lunch of power, if it had reasonably round wheels and could produce power enough to make it chicago (ie so long as it could make it out of the yard) it qualified for the head end of the lashup, a funeral of dead and dying patients often followed. Today’s power consists of two DC GE’s, on being a much detested barn, an sd70m-2 that has thrown a power assembly through the carbody with lube oil still seeping out along the carbody, another ill fated M-2 that had some manner of road failure and the ex Erie Mining C420 7222. The forlorn Alco had spent a number of years in seclusion on the Mineral Range, sadly never seeing service. She had been sold to the Delaware Lackawanna for parts, many of which had been stuffed in her carbody and nose, unlikely to ever see revenue operation again. I have an odd relationship with the Erie Mining, a poorly informed, poorly planned and heavily THC influenced laden solo trip to the northland yielded several now lost rolls of film documenting multiple failed attempts to capture the Erie operations. Don’t do drugs and railfan kids, bad things happen... Anyways, coming across this exceedingly rare remnant of those crazy lost days was one of those moments when the circle comes together. I’m eternally saddened to have botched my one opportunity to witness the Erie in action but at the time figured I’d return armed with more intel and experience. Instead, girls, school and work intervened (among other things). I went off to Arizona for school and by the time I returned to the Midwest the Erie Mining was all but dead. I look back on these days with nostalgia and regret, glad to have at least had a taste of what once was while burdened by the knowledge I had nothing tangible to show for it. Nowadays I make my living doing the thing I once chased as a childhood dream, not so ironically I do so only a few dozen miles from where I blundered my one chance to witness what would remain among my favored roads. Today I drive my young girls up the shore past the overgrown remains of Taconite Harbor on the way to family adventures, every single time a youthful part of me awakens and shakes his sardonic 90’s punk rocker head at me cursing our failures yet applauding our present dat successes. It’s an odd journey we’re on my friends.... an odd journey indeed.