[Peter Baumhefner]

With the emphasis of reducing cost and bringing more dollars to the railroad companies’ bottom line, “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR), became the necessary mantra to implement and operate on all major rail routes. When this first was initiated on the UP and not officially on the BNSF, I started thinking about some of the monster trains we built and operated on the Southern Pacific in the 70s and 80s just to survive a challenging environment. On the Los Angeles Division, I don’t think we ever operated a train with 200+ cars. I could be wrong. But we did operate some 150+ car trains between Los Angeles and West Colton when we didn’t have sufficient locomotives to operate all of the required schedules. I recall a four unit SW1500 locomotive set attempting to pull a 150+ car train from Los Angeles to West Colton. It stalled on the grade between Walnut and Pomona and one of the City of Industry jobs had to be put into helper service to shove the train up to Pomona. Of course, trains this size didn’t fit in any sidings and could tie up an entire dispatching district so they had to be planned when there were few conflicting movements.

I’m sure these weren’t the longest trains SP operated. Does anyone else have stories about long trains while working on the SP?

Pete

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