It was upon the property of the Norfolk & Western that mainline steam locomotion made its last stand---
Ponderous and powerful Y6Bs shoving coal up the Blue Ridge grade---
Sleek and sexy Class As speeding manifests thru Christiansburg---
And the churning 70-inch drivers of J-class 4-8-4s wheeling a 100-mph flash of Tuscan red named the Powhatan Arrow.
“The Alamo of Steam” was rightfully earned, but as with that famous last stand in Texas, the future did not bode well for the protagonists. No matter how well engineered, or how revered were the products of the Roanoke shops, they could not fend off the 1950s onslaught of EMD and Alco diesels.
Technology led the charge.
It scaled the walls of the last bastion of coal-fired steam and won the day.
The resultant funeral pyre was acetylene-fueled.
There were few prisoners.
It is, after all, a double-edged sword, the words “cutting edge” scything a swath through the ranks of the aged but not yet infirm; advances in traction motor current and wheel slip technology and exhaust gas recirculation and microprocessor yada-yada have rendered the familiar and beloved throb of 645s to local and yard work, and early versions of the 710 to storage lines, the steel wheels on the DC traction motor axles rusting to the rails as a great sea of Armor yellow and Harbormist gray SD70Ms sit dormant on the yard tracks at Salt Lake City.
The active ranks of the largest single locomotive order ever placed with EMD have been thinned, pared, whittled-down, put up on the top shelf of the pantry, ACes and Tier-4 units and GE rebuilds helping to close the door.
Perhaps, for the privileged who were in attendance, it seems like just yesterday that they were ‘cutting edge,’ when, in the gorgeous light of a late summer Saturday more than 30 years ago, and certainly to the thrill of the Joint Line Railfans Club gathered for the evening trackside rituals at Palmer Lake, a pair of maroon and silver demonstrators emerged from the shadows of the Grassy Knoll, rumbled along water’s edge, topped the divide with a manifest freight tugging on the drawbar, and then drifted downgrade towards Larkspur.
It was in that pivotal moment---
When the line was inundated with traffic diverted by the Great Flood of ’93 in the Missouri and Mississippi River valleys, when all manner of 1st and 2nd Generation power from every road imaginable showed up to add muscle to the non-stop flow of Powder River coal and freight that had to take the long way around---
That the bellwether arrived on HTCR-4 trucks.
Just as the peaks of the Front Range pierced the setting sun, we rose from our lawn chairs, and from one very cushy bench seat removed from the back row of an old Chevy Suburban for just such purposes, and stood in awe as the new diesels slipped down the valley and into the ever-lengthening shadows, the smooth stroke of their 710s fading out as the summer light fell into dusk, knowing we had just seen the future.
The late afternoon light of a chilly December 2021 afternoon in West Texas is a long way from the Front Range of Colorado. From our vantage point 5 miles west of Marathon, if a crow flies south over the brush and grasses of the high desert, soaring above the fabled Sunset Route and the Sunshine Hills, skirted the left flank of Santiago Peak and continued on in a southerly direction for 86 miles, it would have flown over the beautiful yet harsh and desolate Big Bend country, a veritable moonscape of burnt out cinder cones and metamorphosized rock dotted with creosote bush and cactus of generous species that populate the vast Chihuahuan Desert. It would have endured the updrafts of the high and beautiful Chisos Basin, where a tourist most certainly would stand in awe of the view from The Window. After its long flight, as most avian tourists are wont to do, it perhaps stopped for a drink from the muddy waters of the Rio Grande as the river etched its way through the rugged and forbidding Sierra del Carmen Mountains.
In 1880, the Indian Wars were scant over, the pungent aroma of burnt cartridge powder still fresh across the Comanche Trace at what would soon become the community of Marathon. In their haste to effect a juncture with Colonel Tom Pierce’s Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad, Charlie Crocker’s surveyors and track gangs in the employ of Colis Huntington’s Southern Pacific avoided the expenditure of sweat and resources and money, not to mention additional track miles involved, and steered away from the as-of-yet undiscovered beauty of Big Bend, choosing not to immerse itself in the tourist business as the Denver & Rio Grande did up Colorado way.
After building through the ancient caldera of Paisano Pass and down through what would become Alpine, Texas, the surveyors sited the right of way along the northern spur of the Del Norte Mountains and slipped southward along their flanks, there to curve eastward again along the southern face of Cathedral Mountain, where it emerged into the broad grassy valley of Dry Dugout Creek.
On this day there is ample dust in the desert air to soften the afternoon light and the contours of the Sunshine Hills and Santiago Peak. A rail train of the Union Pacific is in the capable charge of a venerable pair of SD70Ms as the railroad is in the act of extending the siding of Lenox to accommodate the passage of trains that are growing more lengthy and less frequent.
The big d/c EMDs still populate the Southwest, finding work on the head end of such affairs or local freights, or even the occasional hotshot or manifest freight. At the very least they can be seen pulling their weight as mid-train or tail end DPUs.
In a world where the only constant is change, railfans cling to them like a Spanish friar might cling to his rosary beads in the face of Comanche predations on a 17th Century September moon as the braves warred down into Old Mexico in search of horses and other such treasures.
Perhaps as a holy grail, the classic trio of fans atop the radiator section is a direct link back to the 2nd Generation of hood units that rolled out of La Grange more than a generation ago; an SD45-ish appearance that speaks to the memories of those who stood as witness as the 20-cylinder beasts immersed them in sight and sound and bathed them well in aromas of hot diesel exhaust.
We accepted the wide cab simply because it was cool, and it was never more cool than when the 6900s rolled out with them riding on top of silvered four-axle trucks and stormed across the Overland Route with the VAN.
That may have been a long time ago, but no one’s grandfather ever looked as sharp.
He passed along some good genes.
