Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

On Thursday evening, during the massive wind storm, we had the excessively delayed Amtrak train east of Fernley. We could hear the engineer through the scanner, but not the conductor on his hand-held radio, which was odd because normally we should have been able to hear both of them. Radio traffic during the storm was light, but we thought that was because there weren't many trains running due to the storm. But there was more to it than that, as Lisa discovered on Sunday.

( Wind Whipped )

With the replacement antenna in place, normal service was resumed and we soon hear the railroad radio. Indeed, the reception is a little better than usual. Besides hearing the dispatcher covering the Nevada Subdivision (former Southern Pacific) that runs in front of our house, this evening I heard the dispatcher on the Winnemucca Subdivision (former Western Pacific) telling a train crew to tie down their train at Doyle rather than continue to Reno Junction, as they had only 30 minutes of service left. She was sending a crew van to Doyle to collect them.

The loss of that antenna whip tends to confirm that this was the worst wind storm we've had since we moved here in 2011.

It took us a fair bit longer to get packed out of the hotel room in Tonopah today, and indeed, we just barely made the 11 AM check-out time. Leaving Tonopah took even longer because the ROL card-lock gas pumps (off the main road) weren't working. That's a shame because they were 20 cents/gallon cheaper than the ones on Main Street.

We took a long time getting home: nearly eight hours. That's because we spent the day looking for remnants of the Tonopah & Goldfield Railroad, which connected Goldfield and Tonopah to Mina, Nevada, where it connected to the Southern Pacific (Carson & Colorado) Railroad.

( A Big Concrete Hole in the Ground )

I'm not going to share any more of the photos tonight because we got home after sunset and I'm really worn out. Indeed, I'm going to try and take most of Monday off if I can. I should have scheduled that in advance. It's a lot harder for me to recover from these trips than it was twenty years ago.

This month, Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories talks about the subject that was one of the reasons we started making these videos, that being a discussion of why most railway tracks are 1435 mm apart rather than some other distance.



And no, it has nothing to do with the width of Roman chariots.

This evening, Lisa was puttering around the property and taking trash to the dumpster when she saw and heard sounds coming from the railroad tracks that should not be happening. She came in and told me, "I think there's a truck stuck on the railroad tracks!"

I went outside and looked. Unfortunately, while it is one day after full moon, the moon had not yet risen, and it's very dark in Fernley Yard at night with no moon. But there was indeed a pickup truck with two wheels over the main at the West Fernley House Track switch at Union Pacific milepost 276. He was revving his engine hard trying to get over the tracks, but was only digging himself deeper.

I called 911. This was a potentially deadly emergency if the railroad wasn't notified immediately. I reported the approximate street address (my house) and the approximate railroad location. I'd forgotten that the switch is at MP 276, but I knew it was between Union Pacific control points RV275 and RV277, which would be enough to tell UP what they needed to know.

Another car showed up. It was a woman who the man driving the truck had called. I later learned that there were two young girls in the pickup when he drove onto the tracks, and they went with the woman. I told everyone that I'd called 911. About this time the man driving the truck managed to bounce himself over the tracks and into the "six foot" — the area between the main line and Fernley Siding. He then drove west a short distance, turned across the tracks again, and bounced over them (not getting stuck this time) and drove back around to where we were. He then started trying to use some of the loose debris to try and fill in the holes he'd dug.

( The Law Arrives )

This could have been a catastrophe, though. Amtrak was on time today (4:45 PM eastbound), but if they had been running a couple of hours late (very possible), they might have come along while that truck was on the tracks. Both Lisa and I had been keeping an eye out for the signals at West Fernley (MP 275), one mile west of us. Had they lit up, indicating that a train was approaching, we would have urged everyone to get away from the tracks. Fortunately, no trains came while this trackside drama unfolded, and nobody got hurt. We never heard what happened to the driver of the truck or whether he was cited for anything.

We booked two nights at the Super 8 in Cottonwood, Arizona so that we did not have to pack out of the room today. After I logged out of work, we drove the short distance up to Clarkdale for our scheduled ride on the Verde Canyon Railroad.

( To the Trains! )

Between Lisa and me, we took a whole lot more photos than what are in this entry. See the Verde Canyon Railroad Album I created on Flickr if you want to see the whole lot. It's a really nice trip, and I think it was money and time well spent. I wish we'd had more time to go through the museum and read all of the information signs, but we did buy a copy of the route guide that should have additional historical information to be absorbed at greater leisure.

It's only about 15 minutes drive back down to Cottonwood on Arizona 89A. (We drove up to the railroad on historic route US-89A and back on the more modern state route, for variety.) We'd intended to immediately head out to the Black Bear Diner for dinner, but it took me more than an hour to get the photos from both our cameras uploaded, and as you'll see, I didn't try to label or geotag them precisely, as it would have taken even longer. As it happens, it's a good thing we were in the hotel room for some extra time, as I'll explain in my next entry.

Monday night was the Big Event: installing the new switch off the Fernley Main into the Fernley House Track. (As always, you can click through these photos to see more.) I took a lot of photos.

( Goodbye Old Switch )



While I took these photos, I noticed that one of the bunnies was sitting not far away. The poor thing must have no idea what to make of its home being torn up by the earth movers. At one point the rabbit tried to run across the road, but then then changed its mind and ran off in another direction.

( How Many Excavators Does It Take to Change a Track Switch? )

After this last photo above, the light was too low to get many other good photos, so we turned in for the night. We could see (and hear!) how the excavators were used to rip apart the old switch and then stack up the rails and ties for disposal.

( The Morning After )

There's still clean-up to do before the Switch Gang's work is done, but the Big Lift is complete.

The Wigwam Restaurant/Casino held a large collection of Native American artifacts and also a huge collection of other memorabilia, only a token of which was on display in the restaurant. The owners are in the process of selling most of it off in an auction of which today is day 3 of 5. (Link to today's auction, which should lead to the following two days as well.) To my disappointment, a collection of historical photos of the Fernley-Wadsworth area were not included, and the auction house had no information on what happened to them when they were removed from the restaurant. However, there was one item that had been on display behind the register at the restaurant that I found in their catalog: a framed print of the Fernley railroad depot as it would have appeared in its original location diagonally across the street from our house. At the time that this painting represents, our house would have been the much smaller Southern Pacific-built cottage occupied by an SP employee who we understand eventually bought it from the railroad and started expanding on it. The house would have been approximately in a straight line from the print's point of view behind the depot, more or less along the line of trees in the background.

I put in a bid for this print, and I won! In a few days (presumably after the final day of the auction because they'll want to consolidate purchases by each bidder) I should receive information on payment and collection. I hope they'll let me just come by the auction house (which is in Reno) so I can avoid the shipping charges.

Just as Lisa and I were getting ready to drive over to the grocery store this evening, the radio scanner lit up as a Union Pacific train crew radioed the dispatcher and said, "We just hit a truck at milepost 273.5."

( Tying up the mainline the hard way )

While this was disruptive for the railroad, disturbing for the crew, and of course devastating for the owner of the now-ex-pickup truck, all in all everyone got lucky. There could easily have been three dead people on the tracks, victims of their own stupidity in trying to drive over a railroad track without benefit of a grade crossing, and a derailed train and injured or killed crew. As it was, there was only property damage, delay, and inconvenience, and an expensive lesson for a foolish pickup truck driver.

Union Pacific 844 is on its way back from Sacramento to its home in Cheyenne WY. After spending the night at Sparks, it set out east about 8 AM, and Lisa and I were waiting for it when it got to Fernley.

Lisa was set up well in advance, while I followed the progress of 844 via the train's Twitter feed. When the train tweeted that it was passing Thisbe (the siding west of Fernley), I knew that it would be here in less than ten minutes, and sure enough, along she came:



Bear in mind that this site is right across the street from our house. And people ask why we like the place.

Staying at a hotel only a few miles from where we were going meant we didn't have to rush out of the hotel this morning. After the included breakfast, we moved out to the van and drove over to the Colorado Railroad Museum, arriving shortly after they opened at 10 AM. After buying our admissions, I was about to go look at the "orientation video," but Lisa suggested we go on outside before it got too hot. This was a good idea, because the morning overcast had not yet quite burnt off. We headed outside. Lisa stopped to put together her camera equipment and I spotted rabbits grazing on the grass. (She got a picture of one later.)

We looked all over this wonderful collection of both standard- and narrow-gauge rail equipment focused on Colorado's rich railroad heritage. Lisa took lots of photos, which I'm not going to narrate here, although I did give them short descriptions when I posted them to Flickr.

We stayed four a bit over four hours, including having lunch on the grounds, and we had at least a brief look at everything there. We could probably have stayed longer, but (a) it was getting hot; (b) we were both getting tired from accumulated travel fatigue, and (c) we were getting anxious to get moved in to the hotel downtown.

This was a good railroad museum, and some pieces of it, such as the lovely roundhouse/restoration shop, were particularly noteworthy to us, given that we're members of an Oregon railway museum. We enjoyed our stay and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in railroad history, particularly narrow-gauge and Colorado-based roads.