Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

When we got home last night from Carson City, we had an unusual visitor on the tracks at Fernley.

( Big BNSF )

I no longer hear railroad talk on the scanner. I assume that the railroads have gone to a closed-circuit repeater system the same way that emergency services locally have done. Therefore, I do not know why this BNSF train stopped here. An hour or so later, they moved on.

Today I worked a half-day for Day Jobbe, as I have to do on Tuesday. This went a little longer than I had planned. I also was working on some other plans, like trying to find an auto air conditioning repair shop in Winnipeg not too far from the Convention Center area. (I called a couple; the first one was a Volvo specialist, but the second told me to bring it in and they would have a look at it. More about this later this week.) Consequently, we did not get away from Glendive MT until nearly Noon. Our goal was the North Dakota State Railroad Museum in Mandan (Bismark's western suburb). That's about 200 miles.

( Cutting Things Fine )

We were very grateful for the guided tour, and we dropped money into the contribution box and also bought a book about the Northern Pacific. It's difficult for us to visit a railroad museum without buying books.

After leaving the museum, we headed across the Missouri River to Bismarck for another railroad-related photo stop.

( To the Merci Train )

Having managed to tick off the two significant things on our to-do list today, we left Bismarck for tonight's hotel and our final night on the road before we get to Winnipeg.

( Turbines in Tow )

We reached the Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown ND shortly after 8 PM. After getting moved in, I discovered that my initial expectation of another Pizza Hut delivery was out of whack: there used to be a Pizza Hut in this city, but it had closed years ago. By the time we realized this, many other local places we might have tried had already closed at 9 PM. Weighing our options, Lisa and I decided to rush off to a local grocery store. We got there about 9:30, with the store closing at 10 PM. Fortunately, we had a good idea what we wanted. We got milk, juice, frozen meals to cook in the room's microwave oven, cold cuts, and, rather to our surprise, a loaf of Dave's Killer Bread; we did not expect to see Dave's bread this far east.

Returning to the hotel, we prepared our dinner and relaxed over another episode of Emergency!.

We had planned to do some laundry tonight, but we got an unwelcome surprise: unlike nearly every other Holiday Inn Express in the USA in which we've stayed, this one does not have a guest laundry. Had we known that, we would probably have tried to do laundry last night and this morning, which would have been pretty easy, because the laundry room at Glendive was diagonally opposite our hotel room and had three or four machines. Fortunately, the Delta Hotel Winnipeg appears to have a guest self-service laundry facility, so maybe we'll get a chance to do laundry sometime in the next few days during NASFiC and before we leave for Churchill two days after the convention.

Tomorrow we push on to Winnipeg, and move-in begins for Pemmi-Con.

The Big BN through freight collected a locomotive from Fernley Yard yesterday, but not the one that I expected.

( Coming and Going )


We've had lots of threatening clouds around here like the ones in the photo above, but no rain. A fair bit of snow in the Sierra Nevada, keeping chain controls up for most of the past day or so. It's not enough, though. We are way behind our water targets.

Around 7:30 PM as I was getting ready for bed last night, the "Big BN" through freight showed up, and from the discussions on the radio, it appeared that they were going to try and collect and remove the defective locomotive that kept us awake ringing its bell all night long some days ago.

( Not Simple )

According to Lisa, the BNSF crew got that locomotive connected and attempted to restart it, and in so doing caused the bell to start ringing again. It didn't wake me up, but Lisa said they sat there until around midnight fussing with it before finally leaving.

BNSF 502 is gone as of this morning, but most or all of the cars in Fernley yard appear to be untouched. I speculate that when they discovered that they had a broken-down locomotive they realized that they wouldn't have enough power to get their train over the Sierra Nevada, and that they had to leave the Fernley cars in the House Tracks while they made their way with the cars they already had. Presumably the broken locomotive will eventually end up in Stockton, where BNSF (ex-Santa Fe) should be able to do more to repair it.

It does seem to Lisa and me that nobody on the railroad has been talking to anyone else, given that the through-freight crew didn't understand the nature of the problem with the dead locomotive, and the dispatcher hadn't been told anything, either. Personally, we're just relieved that the flaky 502 is out of here.

It's unclear how long the BNSF local will be out of service. Apparently BNSF's contractor was unable to repair it, and I guess BNSF was unable to secure a stand-in, either by delivering one of theirs or by leasing one from Union Pacific the way they were doing for a while a few weeks ago. This means that the cars being dropped off by the "Big BN" through freight can't get to their customers, nor can empties get back to BNSF. This is causing problems for at least one customer in Fallon, and they've had to take alternative measures to get their material.

( Bring on the Trucks )

It takes a lot of road tankers to hold what a rail tanker carries. I reckon that this is an expensive operation, and I know that if I were the customer I would be holding BNSF responsible for the cost.

Debacles like this are what happens when you run things too lean and with no allowance for equipment failures. This, along with trying to run longer but fewer trains so that you can lay off more people and mothball more locomotives are ways in which the supply chain suffers and the railroad gets a black eye from its customers.

I wrote a few days ago about how BNSF sent an (apparently) freshly-painted locomotive 502 out to serve as the power for the "little BN" job that serves the Fernley area. Crews often park this locomotive across the street from our house while a contractor shuttles the crews back and forth to Sparks Yard, rather than taking it back to Sparks. This is usually okay, but last night things went wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, but very annoyingly wrong.

( Ring My Bell )

The main bell on the locomotive rang all night long. It never stopped. Every now and then the secondary bell sounded and the engine attempted another restart, but nothing happened, and the bell kept ringing.

After an hour of putting up with the bell, Lisa called BNSF's 24-hour alert line, as it's their locomotive. BNSF told her to call Union Pacific, as the locomotive is sitting on tracks owned by Union Pacific and is apparently operated by crews contracted from UP. They asked her for the cross-street where this was happening, which is very easy: the corner of Front and Center Streets. The UP agent told Lisa that they would send someone right out. They never did.

Around midnight, a Lyon County Sheriff car turned up. The deputy examined the locomotive for around twenty minutes, then went away. Now, the Sheriff's department is supposed to have the emergency contact information for the railroad. They might even have contacted them, but nobody came to fix it.

( Close Up and Noisy )

As of 9:30 AM Sunday, nearly twelve hours since it started ringing, the locomotive's bell was still clanging away. Lisa did not sleep very well at all last night. At this point, we expect it will ring either until the locomotive's batteries die (which might take a long time; locomotives have big batteries) or the little BN crew shows up. We can only hope that they will be out today, as they typically work a Sunday-Thursday schedule these days.

On Tuesday, the BNSF through freight came through to drop off and pick up cars at the Fernley House Tracks across the street from our house. It was another "rainbow" consist with ever locomotive in a different paint scheme, including a famous one.

( The Warbonnet Lives (Barely) )

Of course, the former ATSF locomotive had to yield to its new owner's name replacing "Santa Fe," but at least we have a brief and fading reminder of an earlier time on the railroad.

Late this afternoon, the "big BN" train came to Fernley to drop off/pick up cars from the Fernley House Tracks. Hearing it arrive, I went out on the porch and realized that the lead locomotive had a special paint scheme. It was coming in slowly enough that I had time to grab my camera phone and activate the camera and get a couple of shots.

( Has it Really Been 25 Years? )

When I ready about this special BNSF paint scheme in the current issue of Trains, I hoped that one of the units would come by our house, and I was lucky that it arrived with the timing necessary for me to get a picture of it.

Most of the locomotives used on the "little BN" (BNSF local switch job) with older paint jobs have been former Santa Fe, but every now and then we get one of the locomotives from the other merger partner, and today was one of those days.

( Cascade Green in the Desert )

I expect the local will leave one of their current units (both painted in versions of the BNSF paint scheme) behind when they next come out to Fernley, and a "Big BN" job will collect it to take it for its required 90-day inspection. Because we're a long way from the nearest BNSF facilities (Stockton and Richmond CA, I think), they just shuttle switching locomotives here every three months, or sometimes sooner when they break down.

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Meanwhile, work continues on the cable/telephone replacement project. Today we went to Big R and got a masonry drill bit and screws and a metal U bracket to attach the new conduit to the outside wall. Lisa got out the impact drill we bought for the carport project and made short work of drilling a hole in the rock. Actually she first tried a hole in the mortar, but it turned out to be too soft to hold a screw, so she had to put it in the rock, which worked just fine. That drill wasn't cheap, and probably has less than 30 minutes aggregate run time on it, but the many hours it has saved compared to trying to use a smaller, less-fit-for-purpose tool to drive anchors into concrete and masonry have made it well worth the purchase.

While owning a home means lot of extra work in some ways, it's so nice to not have to ask anyone's permission if you want to drill a hole in your own wall.

Local trains and switch jobs usually end up with cast-offs and hand-me-downs. The BNSF Local serving industries between Sparks, USA Parkway, Fernley, and Hazen is no exception.

( Green Machine in Fernley )

Currently the BNSF local has this locomotive, two FURX (Wells Fargo Rail leasing, former First Union Rail), and one BNSF locomotive to choose from. Based on what I'm hearing on the scanner, only one of the four units works, and it's not this BNSF 2097.