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Missed It By That Much
Apr. 19th, 2024 11:11 amAs anyone reading this for long should know, two Amtrak trains pass our house most days: the westbound (#5) and eastbound (#6) California Zephyr. Amtrak has recently changed their schedule to insert more recovery time, but before they did that, the westbound, when running on time, passed Fernley at about 7:45 AM, and the eastbound passed around 4:45 PM. I have a meeting every morning from 7 to 8 AM, so I sometimes don't notice when #5 passes. Yesterday afternoon, I heard the dispatcher talking to an Amtrak train and realized that he was talking to #5, not #6. Checking the Amtrak Status map, I saw that the westbound train was running roughly eight hours late. Late running isn't unusual (unfortunately), but this was a bit more than usual. The eastbound train was roughly on time, which meant that there was a possibility of something happening that Lisa and I have witnessed here at Fernley only once: a meet of the two Amtrak trains in front of our house.
The Nevada Subdivision that runs from Sparks to Winnemucca is single track with passing sidings every ten miles or so. Fernley is one of those sidings. The one to the west is called Thisbe, and the one to the east is Darwin.
I kept an eye on the train status map, and it eventually became clear that they weren't going to meet here at Fernley. I did photograph the two trains as they passed.
( Trains Passing in the Afternoon )
One place that this pair of trains cannot meet is Reno itself, which only has one platform. I think that the two trains have converged on the station at least once before, which looks like it causes all manner of trouble for the dispatcher, who has to hold one of them out of the station, blocking both tracks and thus all other rail traffic in the area. (The railroad is double-tracked from Sparks to the Bay Area except for a couple of single-track sections in the Sierra Nevada where Southern Pacific tore up one line to save money when they were in a "burn-the-furniture" mode before Union Pacific merged them.) I bet it's pretty chaotic at the station itself, too, as they try to deal with two trains nearly simultaneously when it's normally one in the morning and another in the afternoon.
The Nevada Subdivision that runs from Sparks to Winnemucca is single track with passing sidings every ten miles or so. Fernley is one of those sidings. The one to the west is called Thisbe, and the one to the east is Darwin.
I kept an eye on the train status map, and it eventually became clear that they weren't going to meet here at Fernley. I did photograph the two trains as they passed.
( Trains Passing in the Afternoon )
One place that this pair of trains cannot meet is Reno itself, which only has one platform. I think that the two trains have converged on the station at least once before, which looks like it causes all manner of trouble for the dispatcher, who has to hold one of them out of the station, blocking both tracks and thus all other rail traffic in the area. (The railroad is double-tracked from Sparks to the Bay Area except for a couple of single-track sections in the Sierra Nevada where Southern Pacific tore up one line to save money when they were in a "burn-the-furniture" mode before Union Pacific merged them.) I bet it's pretty chaotic at the station itself, too, as they try to deal with two trains nearly simultaneously when it's normally one in the morning and another in the afternoon.
