The Stories She Could Tell Here's a Freight Car Friday offering from a long time ago. One of my earliest special assignments during my time at the Alaska Railroad was to co-chair the Freight Car Committee with AVP of Marketing Pat Flynn. This was a cross departmental team made up of members from Marketing, Transportation, Mechanical, and Engineering tasked with rationalizing the fleet and building a business case for the acquisition of new (used) equipment to replace in kind or meet the changing traffic needs. Over the course of a couple years we sold over 125 cars mostly for scrap but a few on their own wheels or for other purposes, such as bridges or cabins, and generated more than a half million dollars in net income. We also retrucked a dozen old gondolas and boxcars retained for engineering use finally bringing to a close the friction bearing era on the ARRC in late 2009. We also led the installation of three AEI readers placed strategically on the system and speared the AEI tagging of the entire fleet, even non interchange and non revenue equipment and worked with RMI to use that to automate train reportings. It was a fun time, but also a sad one for the railfan in me. This car was maybe the coolest and most obscure to meet the torch. Whitelined 686E is tiny little 40 ft wood deck flat car that most recently served as the idler with locomotive crane LC110. This car was by far the oldest we scrapped with a build date of April 1918! To put things in perspective, in that month Woodrow Wilson was president, the Great War was still raging in Europe, and Anchorage was not yet incorporated as a city and was still little more than a construction camp for the Alaska Engineering Commission. In fact when this car was built the railroad still hadn't been completed along Turnagain Arm (the first train between Seward and Anchorage wouldn't happen until September of that year) so I wonder if this car was offloaded in Seward or Anchorage initially? It would be more than five years before President Harding would drive the golden spike at Nenana on July 15, 1923 and this car could travel all the way to Fairbanks. 90 years isn't a bad run, and I sure wonder what stories this simple little car of wood and steal could tell us? Where was she built? How did she get here? What was her original number? What loads has she hauled? How many times has she derailed? How many countless brakemen have wound up her staff brake? And more....what a strange thing that a rusty old scrap of a car could conjure so much wonderment. Anyway, I'm sure I'm not not only one amongst this vast railroad fraternity that can be pulled to the past by something as simple as this. And speaking of the past. Here's a nice concise history of the building of the Alaska Railroad with some cool photos if you care to learn more. Anchorage, Alaska
|
