Around The Loop

Another frame from this ride over the mountain on a southbound coal train over a decade ago. This is taken only a dozen or so car lengths further from the prior post just as the top of the loop was reached before the curve reverses and the train twists away from itself.

The mid train DPU helpers can be seen to the left of trailing SD70MAC 4328 in this view taken from the cab of 4004 which was the second of 3-MACs on the head end of this 10,765 ton loaded 182S coal train. The three mid-train units (4322, 4327, 4014) are passing in front of the face of Bartlett Glacier, one of three massive rivers of ice that are signatures of the trip south to Seward. The 74 car train is seen winding around a 14 degree curve while battling a 3% grade on the single most spectacular section of line on the Alaska Railroad (which is saying a lot for a road consisting of innumerable superlatives). At their closest point the track centers are only about 230 feet apart, though about 0.7 miles away by rail and more than 110 foot difference in elevation!

This is just about MP 48 on the ARR mainline, and we were at an elevation of about 750 feet having climbed from sea level in only 15 miles. We still had 313 more feet to ascend in three more miles until the 1063foott crest of the Kenai Mountains were reached at Grandview Summit.

If a train is going to stall on the railroad this is where it will happen, but not today. The rail was clean and dry and the heavy train marched up the grade in notch 8 at a respectable 9 MPH.

For decades the ARR doubled this hill, even after the arrival of the SD70MACs. When I came to the ARR they were running the trains 3x1 and would stop at Spencer and tie down the rear 40 and DPU and take 30 cars 15 miles up and over Grandview Summit to Hunter siding on the south side of the pass. Then the three light units would run back over to Spencer and get the rear 40 and take them up and over before putting it all back together for the last 38 miles or so to Seward.

I made the business case that by adding two more units we could eliminate the time consuming double that added 30 miles and 3 or more hours to the trip. And, most importantly it meant that the train crews would only have to pass through the 4 1/2 miles of slide zones only once instead of three times. Considering how active the snow is in this area particularly in late winter and spring this consideration was a serious risk reduction to the operating crafts and the change was welcomed by the UTU.

New the year this was taken was an increase in train size to 75 cars with the DPUs cut in behind the 38th head car. Prior to October of 2010 the trains were kept to 70 cars with the DPU power positioned on the rear. But with Usibelli's export tonnage on the rise and growth on the horizon (albeit short lived as told in other posts) the boys in Healy were constantly pressuring us to find ways to increase tons per trip and to lessen the cycle time of their train set. The processes I described here were one way we did that.

At Joe Usibelli's urging we'd end up trying even longer trains up to 80 cars (if memory serves me right) which required a 7th MAC added to the rear in a 3x3x1 configuration. In addition to the onerous delay this caused cutting in and setting up the power in Anchorage (only three units ever handled the train between Anchorage and Healy) 80 cars caused a lot of headaches at the Seward facility given the need to make multiple cuts in order to dump the train in the geographically constrained terminal whose tracks literally ran right up to the very edge of Resurrection Bay.

But all that trial and error and perfecting of our operating process would be moot in a few short years. Less than a year after I took this photo we purchased 70 additional aluminum hoppers to cycle two complete train sets making two 720 mile round trips per week and delivered just about 1.1 million metric tons to 18 ships in calendar year 2011. This was the best year in the history of the Alaskan export market, and in fact we were working on plans to get to over 2 million! But from those halcyon days the business evaporated just as quickly as it had boomed, and four years later only four colliers called on Seward.

With only one ship for all of 2016 the ARRC called it quits and laid off the 16 employees at the terminal, mothballed the facility, and sold off the hoppers. The loops here have been pretty quiet since...seeing only summer passenger trains and no more freights than you can count on one hand in a good year. It seems unlikely you'll ever again witness trains this size doing battle with gravity and physics on Alaska's mountain railroad.

I for one am grateful I was afforded the privilege in life to witness this and serve as part of the esteemed ARRC team for some great years.

Sic Transit Gloria....

Chugach National Forest
South of Portage, Alaska
Wednesday November 17, 2010

Photo courtesy of Dave Blazejewski