Rio Grande Coal Train Roll-By

A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words. Here’s 13,000+ Words.

Flip the calendar back to 1991 for a moment. It’s a half-year after the first Gulf War. George H.W. Bush is president. I was a LOT younger. And, despite the D&RGW-SP merger of ’88, the Colorado railroad scene had the appearance of not much having changed.

I had been with my new company for about a year, and they sent me to a MIS users conference in Denver. I decided to stay with my sister in Lafayette, and I brought my camera along with the intention of finding some railroad stuff during my free time. The morning of November 20th, I arose quite early to try to catch a train at Coal Creek Canyon, not too many miles from sister’s house– all this before the start of our workday on 17th Street in downtown Denver. I had it in my head that the railroad always had a train coming down the mountain first thing in the morning, and headed out with camera to record it. (Now I know that there’s no such thing as a schedule for freight trains– and yet I got lucky.)

As dawn was breaking I parked at the mouth of the canyon and hiked up to Tunnel 1. I’d not seen any trains coming down the Front Range and didn’t hear any train sounds, so chanced a quick hike through the tunnel. Yeah, yeah, I know; risky and trespassing yada yada… Having survived the trek, I found a vantage and was almost immediately rewarded with the sound of horns blowing for the east switch at Plain siding, just up the hill. Within minutes, a huge coal train rumbled into view, and the day was on!

Click images to see a much-enlarged version

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Let me pause for a brief comment or two. Many of these photos have been around my website for years, but I’ve never grouped them all together in sequence. Arranging them this way tells the story from the context, more than just the isolated images can. More information about specific locomotives can be found on the roster pages. Regarding photography, I used my Minolta X-700 with its stock 50mm lens (not owning a telephoto at the time), and shooting with ASA100 film. At that point in my life, using slide film would have been an expensive inconvenience– I didn’t own a slide projector, and scanners were far, far in the future. In other words, I was more interested in having prints to look at than in archiving images for the future…

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OK, back to the story. After blowing a lot of film (by my standards) on the leaders, I waited for the swing helper set to arrive. Mind you, this is before remote unmanned helpers were a thing; each group of locomotives had a crew on board to control them. After an interminable period of coal hoppers rumbling and squealing past, the three swings hove into view.

Why I didn’t photograph all three up-close is inexplicable. In the digital age I would have taken 50 or more images of this one train. All I can say is: (1) film cost money and money was a LOT tighter then; (2) This is years before the Internet when I would be posting rosters and such; (3) in 1991 I hadn’t started caring about such questions. Now, of course, I’m frustrated with my younger, less-thorough self!

Reference previous comment about conserving film. I took no close-ups of the rear helper locomotives.

The moment the tail of the train went into the tunnel I jogged in after it (not likely to get run over at this point), and emerged at the other end in time to catch some shots of the train as it looped across the opposite side of the canyon.

It was a pretty good way to start the day, especially considering the mind-numbing sessions that consumed the rest of the day afterwards. And I should mention that this was the first time I’d seen any of the Grande’s SD50’s in the flesh.

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Time for another sidebar. I made this excursion by myself, in the pre-cell-phone era, without so much as sharing my plans with anybody, and walked through a railroad tunnel– twice! Talk about irresponsible. What he hell was I thinking? Oh wait; I still take solo trips places without informing people of the details. I gotta cut that crap out…

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About a month later I again visited the site, this time with family, and saw a nearly-identical operation roll by. Early on the morning of December 30th we piled into a car with my brother’s family and headed back to the same place. Why I so frequently went to T1’s west portal in this era is a question I can’t answer. Well, once again I got lucky with a downhill coal train. I took even fewer photos this time; perhaps I intended to rely on my brother’s camcorder video. Despite that I did get a few memorable images.

The swing helper consisted of an SD50 / SD40T-2 pair. No. 5512 shows us her numberboards, but the tunnel motor behind remains anonymous. I took no photos of the rear helper set but I do remember that it was a tunnel motor plus an SD45 on the very end– which really chaps me for not taking any photos!

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Watching these two coal trains, I was left with an interesting impression. To me, they gave off an aura of competence. Professionalism. Business-like. I realize that’s possibly an odd thing to say, but they seemed well-maintained and no-nonsense. They felt new, even though I know the equipment was all a few years old. Somehow the internal culture of the Rio Grande organization was tangibly expressed by these coal trains. Sadly that image would falter in the coming years as more and more long-neglected SP equipment showed up.

Did I say that the D&RGW-SP merger seemed not to have caused changes in Colorado operations? Little did I know that conversations were happening in corporate offices that would soon change that. About three months later, upon recommendations of consultants, the SP system decided to go with the Southern Pacific brand as its public face. It also decided to stop operating the Rio Grande portion of the system as a separate entity as had been happening. Henceforth locomotives were pooled system-wide and most Rio Grande operating philosophies were discontinued. The days of solid sets of Gold/Black power were effectively over. I had accidentally captured examples of the very end of an era.

Now, some 3+ decades later, even coal trains grow rare, as American energy tastes and beliefs shift. A coal train of Rio Grande cars and power is a thing of another era entirely. Hopefully these photos tell a story of that bygone time.