09/23/07 - BNSF's Mojave Desert Crossing

The Overall Trip Plan

Our goal on this trip is to follow BNSF’s Transcon out as far as New Mexico. For almost all of that distance, the line is closely paired with old Route 66 (the National Trails Highway) and I-40, a large east-west freeway that cuts through the landscape like a lash from a giant whip. While lacking in character, I-40 provides a convenient means to rapidly skip the less interesting sections along the way where the tracks are not paired with a road.

This whole trip is basically an out an back route meaning that we can be selective about where we stop, knowing that we get another chance at any locations that we missed or want to spend more time at on the way back. The plan is for us to be back in the Bay Area by Sunday, September 30.

Tehachapi, Ca to Kingman, Az.

Today we travel from Tehachapi to Kingman, Arizona a distance of 294 miles. Marto and I elected to do the trip from Tehachapi to Barstow just after dawn to allow more time to enjoy the Barstow area and the Needles Sub, a long time favorite stretch of railroading for both of us. There were a few trains to punctuate the trip over to Barstow. Here’s a clip of one we caught just after leaving near Monolith.

We kept moving and made a note to spend more time on this line on our way back.

Barstow

The town of Barstow has a nice railroad feel to it, nice to us rail fans that is.

The town is slung along the south side of the massive BNSF Barstow Yard and pretty much all day long, the sounds of cars squealing along the yard’s many miles of track drift up to the main street as a constant reminder of the town’s main reason for being.

Good to see the change in the sky too! It was clear blue skies for the rest of this trip except for some marine layer around Cajon Pass later in the trip.

This view from B Hill barely captures the expansiveness of the yard and the surrounding desert. A stack train is easing along the bypass track in the foreground. It will soon be heading across to Tehachapi, ninety miles distant.

We loaded up with coffee at the Starbucks on E. Main Street near I-15, the main route between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Main street is also our first encounter with Route 66. It feels good to be back on the mother road!

Across the street from the Starbucks is a MacDonalds decked out in a bright railroad theme with coaches and a caboose or two. Aside from a few mural paintings in Old Town Barstow, this is the dominant public reference to Barstow’s railroading heritage. With modern railroads so eager to quietly get on with business out of the public eye as much as possible, the public is left to create railroad references largely on their own. The colors are certainly very cheery, and I’m a sucker for cupola cabooses!

As a side note, the many tourists briefly stopping here on their bus trips to Vegas were entirely oblivious to the amazing display of railroading on the triple track just  few feet on the other side of the back fence to the right of this shot.

Daggett

Other than a row of houses and old buildings on either side of the main tracks, Daggett is little more than a desert hamlet with a couple of grade crossings over the busy triple track BNSF main line. The location has plenty of importance to railroaders by virtue of the fact that UP’s Salt Lake City line to LA merges with the BNSF Needles Sub at the east end of Daggett.

The tracks crossing the road belong to UP. These tracks curve to join the Needles Sub, which runs left to right through mid-picture. The BNSF CTC signals are the ones on the massive cantilever structure. They control UP trains moving onto BNSF tracks headed for Barstow and beyond. The smaller single mast signals below the signal bridge and just to the far side of it face trains moving from the Needles Sub onto the UP Salt Lake line.

Marto and I walked down the line toward Barstow to check out the new triple track arrangement. To accommodate the flow of UP trains on top of the streetcar-like BNSF traffic on this route, BNSF recently laid an additional track to Barstow, ten miles west of here.

BNSF 1001 is heading west to Barstow under the new CTC signal bridge on the west end of Daggett. This mile-long sting of containers are heading back empty to Asia for more cheaply manufactured toothpaste or flat screen TV’s or whatever so two big GE’s is power enough to get them across the Transcon.

We walked back toward the junction at Daggett as the 1001 rolled leisurely westward. The helpers rolled by once we had gotten on the other side of the signal bridge. This type of DPU help was very common. It doesn’t matter which way the units are facing since they are unmanned.

Not long after the 1001 disappeared from view, a BNSF Z-train blasted out of Barstow toward the wide open spaces of the Mojave. Trains are visible for miles here. The sight of that triangular pattern of lights just keeps coming and coming. At this point we had headlights coming from both directions as a UP local had swung onto the Needles Sub a little east of our position.

Tire Trouble

The plan was to keep moving east through the day so next on our list was Ludlow. As we took off, I happened to have my window down and I could hear the click…click…click coming from the front tire on my side. Sure enough there was a big ole galvanized nail in the tire. We  (actually “I”, to be fair to Marto) contemplated continuing as planned for a few miles till I came to my senses. There’s really nowhere to get a tire repaired between here and Needles and there’s plenty of desert to break down in. And oh, did I mention it was Sunday!!

It gives you some idea of how eager I was to enjoy the action on the Mojave line. For ten miles I was actually willing to risk a flat in the middle of nowhere before I came to my senses and drove back to Barstow to get it fixed. If you ever have car trouble in the Barstow area, I recommend Barstow Tire and Brake on W. Main Street. They had the tire fixed in less than 20 minutes. They have a celebrity photo wall in the office which Marto recognized from one of our trips ten years ago.

It turns out we had ended up here before to get my brakes fixed on one of those prior trips. These guys have saved my railfanning butt twice!

BNSF’s Needles Sub

If it had turned out that the Needles Sub was the same distance from where I live as Tehachapi Pass, I would probably spend most of my railroading time on the Needles Sub. And I really dig Tehachapi! The Needles Sub is actually out of reach, at least for rational weekend trips, so I have not visited here as often as I would have liked and heading out to the Needles Sub on this Sunday morning, I was feeling pretty darned good about things. And Marto was stoked to be here. Living in Australia really puts this stretch of track out of reach, especially for a weekend trip!

Ludlow

There’s several interesting locations between Daggett and Ludlow. We stuck to the highway and its high speed limit to make up for lost time getting the tire fixed. I have visited the hills just west of Ludlow where the tracks curve and stretch to ease the grade west on several previous trips. When we arrived there was an eastbound train holding at that point. A standing train could easily portend bad news, perhaps track problems, but it turned out the dispatcher was shuffling trains east of here and the one at Ludlow was holding because, ahead, both tracks were occupied by trains barreling west towards the crossovers at Ludlow.

We gassed up the van at the town and drove east up ‘66 to the grade crossing a mile and a half up the hill. The hope was that eastbounds would give a good show as they hit the hill. This is the view looking west toward Ludlow. The signals in the foreground are block signals in both directions. It’s any track any direction for a couple of hundred miles. By the way, check out the huge cantilever on the grade crossing lights!

Here’s the sequence. First came a WB stack train led by BNSF 8709 a conventional cab blue and yellow GP60 along with two GP60B’s and an SD40-2. This was one of my favorite consists out of the hundreds we saw.

Then a few minutes later, BNSF 5196 bore down on the Ludlow crossovers with a long string of TOFC’s.

This is the view down toward Ludlow. The track swings to the left at the bottom of the hill. The eastbound waiting at Ludlow is between the first and second line poles.

Next was westbound BNSF 7588, a GEVO with the “swoosh” logo, trailing an SD40-2 lugging a load of international stacks. That’s I-40 in the background. The hills in the distance have distinctive shades of purple and brown on the far side of the tilted, sandy desert floor.

Now it was time for the BNSF 5003, the stacker that had been holding at Ludlow. The hill was just a minor inconvenience to this train. Out here, the BNSF is serious about moving tonnage at speed.

We saw a lot of more of this guy, we paced him for about a hundred miles! Marto grabbed this clip between Siberia and Amboy.

The Mojave is not flat, rather it has long shallow undulations extending for dozens of miles. Route 66 is pretty straight and mostly parallels the BNSF tracks. This is the view somewhere near Cadiz Road.

There’s the BNSF 5003 again, this time near Cadiz. The mountains are spectacular out here.

About two thirds of the way to Needles, the line climbs Goffs Hill. Route 66 leaves the BNSF line but Goffs Road closely hugs the line over the hill for about twenty miles. The BNSF 5003 had been close by as we drove toward Needles. We paced 5003 for a few miles along Goffs Road, then took advantage of the slowing effects of the hill on the train and drove up to the crest to watch him.

At Goffs, another eastbound stack ahead of the 5003 was rolling over the crest onto the downslope as another westbound stack was completing its climb out of the Colorado River valley. Truly a smorgasbord for rail fans!

Bannock

Bannock lies on the grade east of Goffs, on the way to Arrowhead Junction. Aside from a deviation at the top of the hill, Goffs Road is back to running very close to the right of way here, affording some great pacing and closeup views of the railroad. On the day we passed by, a bad order articulated autorack had been set out in the siding about two miles west of Arrowhead Jct.

A very simple and easily modeled scene. Note the sparse vegetation. It is very sandy out here.

And it wasn’t long before a westbound stack showed up.

Klinefelter

Moving a little to the east of Arrowhead Jct, we stopped to bag a few at Klinefelter. The line makes some lazy curves along the base of some impressive jagged mountains. On the other side of this range lies the southern tip of Nevada and, on the other side of the Colorado River, Arizona.

Here’s a sequence of shots from a nicely powered westbound trailer train heading into the lowering sun. The BNSF orange looks fantastic in the afternoon light among the desert colors.

Hot trains get newer power. More than half the trains we saw had a swoosh unit, usually a Gevo, but we did catch a few SD’s with the new logo as well. Marto’s a big convert to the new scheme.

This train was all business, leaning into the curves and clawing at the grade. Note the deep tire tracks in the service roads here.

Looking east toward Needles. The barren purplish mountain faces are a signature feature of the Mojave.

Where would domestic intermodal operations be without companies like UPS and Schneider?

Klinefelter is only about fifteen minutes drive from Needles. Ten minutes further east is the large truss bridge spanning the Colorado River at Topock, now on the BNSF Seligman Sub. We wanted to get to our destination in daylight so we headed for Kingman.

Kingman, Arizona

There’s not much to see between Topock and Kingman. The desert landscape is more vegetated in parts that the eastern Mojave and the sandy soil continues to dominate. For a lot of the trip from Topock to Kingman, the tracks are not close to the road so we took advantage of the 75mph limits on the freeway.

A few miles out of Kingman we encountered this eastbound stacker with a couple of rear end distributed power units earning their keep. There are stiff grades approaching Kingman and the line winds its way though some rugged canyons to keep the grade manageable.

On the west side of Kingman, the freeway also climbs up through the distinctive cliffs. This view is a welcome change from the flatness of the desert floor.

Kingman has a nice depot, though it’s no longer open. Marto was keen to get shots of depots in this part of the BNSF to capture a little of the flavor of the old Santa Fe.

Next to the depot is a trio of interesting water towers.

With light fading we were just in time to catch the EB 7749. It was great to hear the chug of the big GE’s in the canyon before the train hurried past the depot moving faster than I expected given the grade through here and caught me off guard. Marto was ready though a little close for comfort!

Two hundred ninety miles from Tehachapi. Not a bad haul for one day!

Tomorrow we head for Gallup, New Mexico.

Coxy.