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DAILY POST: Southern Pacific Yuba Pass, California 1992

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Westward Freight Descends Donner Pass.

Southern Pacific on Donner Pass.
A westward Southern Pacific freight led by SD45 7422 negotiates the curves on the west slope of California’s Donner Pass at the railroad location known on the timetable as Yuba Pass (and on Interstate-80 as ‘Yuba Gap’). This was exposed on a Kodachrome 25 slide film at 4:25 pm October 4, 1992.

On October 4, 1992, Brian Jennison and I gave a Donner Pass tour to a pair of Union Pacific officials visiting from Omaha.

We started the morning early and drove to Andover on fire roads to witness a westward freight climbing through the curves in Cold Stream Canyon west of Truckee. Later we went up to Troy on the west slope and made an inspection of the Cascade Bridges.

Southern Pacific was busy that day. My notes indicate that we photographed nine trains, including Amtrak 5 and 6 (California Zephyrs).

At 3:40pm we caught this westward freight near Donner Summit at the snow sheds in Norden, California, then followed it west to Yuba Pass.

I climbed to the top of a hill over looking the line and exposed a sequence of Kodachrome slides with my Nikon F3T fitted with a f4.0 200mm lens mounted on a Bogan 3021 tripod. This slide was exposed at f4.5 1/250th of  a second. (I bracketed up and down 1/3 stops to insure I made an optimally exposed slide).

Check out earlier Southern Pacific posts: Donner Pass Part 1, Southern Pacific SD45 at Old Gorge on Donner Pass, July 1990, Southern Pacific’s Roseville Yard, February 1990, and Southern Pacific SD45s on Kodachrome.

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http://briansolomon.com/trackingthelight/

 

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photography

Chicago Central & Pacific May 20, 1995

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The maelstrom of 1980s-1990s mergers and spin-offs left very few railroads untouched; in this dramatic re-drawing of the railway map, some roads, such as CC&P, have been nearly forgotten.
The maelstrom of 1980s-1990s mergers and spin-offs left very few railroads untouched; in this dramatic re-drawing of the railway map, some roads, such as CC&P, have been nearly forgotten.

Chicago Central & Pacific: there and gone.

Eighteen years ago today, May 20, 1995, I made this image of a CC&P former Illinois Central GP9 (still wearing pre-Illinois Central Gulf, IC black) working across the Burlington Northern crossing at East Dubuque, Illinois.

For me, this image of a train emerging from the inky depths of a leaf-covered, stratified cliff, crossing another set of tracks and reaching out of the frame, neatly sums up the short history of the CC&P.

During the mid-1980s, Illinois Central Gulf dramatically trimmed its route structure. Among the lines carved out of ICG, was the Chicago-Omaha/Sioux City CC&P. Born at the end of 1985, this ambitious regional line competed for east-west traffic on the its Chicago-Omaha trunk, while serving on-line customers. After a little more than a decade, Illinois Central (by it then had dropped the ‘Gulf’ in its name—adopted as a reflection of the early 1970s merger with Gulf, Mobile & Ohio) reacquired CC&P.

During the relatively short interval of CC&P independence, the railroad never re-painted all of its locomotives, many of which had been in inherited from ICG. Shortly after, CC&P was melded back into the IC family, it too was absorbed by Canadian National. At the time of this photo, CN was actively using trackage rights on BN, and its trains crossed CC&P’s line 8 to 10 times daily.

Railroad Family Trees Coming Soon!

My book, tentatively titled Railroad Family Trees will be available from Quayside Publishing Group later this year.

 

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