part II of john mcphee's New Yorker article on Powder River run, at long last

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Copyright 2005 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

The New Yorker

October 10, 2005

SECTION: FACT; A Reporter At Large; Pg. 62

LENGTH: 8240 words

HEADLINE: COAL TRAIN-II;
Going into Thunder.

BYLINE: JOHN MCPHEE

BODY:
(An armadillo is a van sent out on highways to replace train crews
whose regulated hours of service have run out. Dick Eisfeller makes and
sells Warholian movies of freight trains. Scott Davis is an engineer,
Paul Fitzpatrick a conductor. Their routine "turn" is between North
Platte, Nebraska, and Marysville, Kansas, on the Union Pacific
Railroad. A manifest train has varied types of cars and cargoes. An
intermodal train carries containers, often double-stacked. "Consist" is
a railroad term for what a train is carrying. Bailey Yard, in North
Platte, is the largest railroad yard in the world. On a January
morning, Davis and Fitzpatrick are about to leave Bailey Yard in CNAMR,
a nineteen-thousand-ton coal train, on its way east from the Powder
River Basin of Wyoming, locus of the largest coal mines on earth.)

Over the hundred and eight miles between Bailey Yard and Gibbon
Junction, Nebraska, more than two hundred miles of freight trains are
in motion every day. While the advent of the Powder River coal trains
has doubled the volume, it has more or less quadrupled the viscosity.
The hot intermodals, the high-priority perishable services-the
shooters-are not what they used to be. Commonly, they average eighteen
miles an hour on the Triple-Track Main.

We met coal trains, Q trains ("westbound hot shots"), coal trains,
autotrains, rock trains, grain trains, coal trains, Z trains, manifest
trains. A sixty-sixhundred-foot stack train coming almost straight at
you seems like a city about to collapse. At least a third of the trains
were empty, not only the westbound coal trains returning to the Powder
River Basin but autotrains, rock trains, grain trains, and ballast
trains-all going back to somewhere for more. We went by twenty miles of
motionless trains, waiting to get into North Platte, queued up on a
plain so open and vast that we went over farm grade crossings that had
no lights or gates, just the big wooden X of Stop Look & Listen. We
passed lone grain elevators that resembled the United Nations building
and were so large that they had their own switch engines.

From North Platte to Gibbon Junction, we descended seven hundred and
forty feet, an average grade of .113 per cent-a slope much too subtle
to be seen by the human eye. The descent continued at the same average
rate all the way to Marysville, which is fifteen hundred and
ninety-nine feet lower than North Platte. The significant grades along
the way-Hayland Hill, Hastings Hill, the divide between the Big Blue
and Little Blue-reminded me of fish in a river. I couldn't see them.
Scott could. I would not have known they were there had Scott not made
remarks from time to time about "coming up into these hills" or
"pulling a pretty good grade." I could feel grades, surely-feel the
uphill deceleration of nineteen thousand tons, feel the release when
they were over a summit and rolling free-but even on the named hills
the track looked, to me, essentially level. If you ride a bicycle, you
know when you are going uphill, even where the gradient is so slight
that your eye doesn't pick it up. In a nineteen-thousand-ton train,
your physical perception of grade is much the same as it would be if
you were on a twenty-pound bicycle-especially if your name is Scott
Davis.

Run a coal train out of the Powder River Basin and down to Kansas and
Arkansas and across the South into Georgia. The steepest grade you
encounter is 1.5 per cent, on track that to the eye seems close to
level. You can discern that it is going up or down, but it will not
remind you of Crested Butte. It will seem less steep than the East
Pacific Rise. Yet a loaded coal train running wide open in Notch 8 can
attack a 1.5-per-cent grade and soon be beaten down under ten miles an
hour. The steepest mainline railroad grade in the United States is
Saluda Hill, coming off the Blue Ridge of North Carolina at five per
cent-a thousand vertical feet in four miles. It is not presently used.
To get up it, trains were cut into thirds. To get down it, Dick
Eisfeller says, "they were extremely careful, put it that way." The
base of the hill is called Slaughter Pen Cut. In the Hudson Highlands,
of New York, the Mt. Beacon Incline Railway, also out of service now,
went up a grade of sixty-five per cent, lifting passengers fifteen
hundred feet to views of the Hudson River. I rode up the Mt. Beacon
Incline Railway once and was able to discern the angle. In a litany of
comparative grades, Mt. Beacon doesn't really count. The locomotive was
made by the Otis Elevator Company. The steepest surviving mainline
grade is near four per cent-at Raton Pass, in the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains, between Colorado and New Mexico. Glorieta Pass, near Santa
Fe, is 3.0. In California, the steepest grades in the Sierra Nevada
reach 2.4-a grade that can be expressed as a one-mile ramp to the roof
of a twelve-story building, nothing more. In the so-called Punch Bowl
below Cajon Pass, in the San Bernardino Mountains-entrance to the Los
Angeles Basin and once the route of the Super Chief-there are three
tracks, with grades, respectively, of 2.2, 2.2, and 3.0. The routes of
the heavy coal trains rarely include grades much over one per cent. The
roadbeds may look flat, but the difference in steepness between 1.2 and
1.5 can be prohibitive.

Whatever the route, somewhere between origin and destination there is
going to be a ruling grade-the one that is more challenging than any
other. Trains are made up to meet ruling grades-barely. If you need
thirteen hundred horsepower to get up your ruling grade, you'll be
given three AC4400 locomotives. Many summits are marked by metallic
yellow flags with black triangles on them. If something slips, or you
lose an engine and you don't make it past a yellow flag, call an
armadillo.

Direct-current diesel-electric locomotives are fine for hauling
autotrains, intermodal containers, and sugar beets, but alternating
current is the better way to move the weight of coal. A.C. traction
motors-the result of a newer technology-can handle more current and
pull more loaded coal cars. In the D.C. days of the twentieth century,
railroads ran trains with as many as five locomotives. Now, with A.C.
traction motors, trains of the same gross tonnage and on the same
routes can be driven by three. A coal train is so heavy that it should
be limited to a hundred cars if the locomotives are only on the front
end, because with greater length and added tonnage the couplers between
cars will start to break; the train literally tears itself apart. In
the middle nineteen-nineties, slave locomotives under
computer-coordinated radio control were added in the middle or at the
rear of trains, to push in synchronization with the pull from the
front, taking pressure off the couplers. That is when coal trains grew
in length to a mile and a half. The pull-and-push method, integrally
operated by the engineer, is known as distributed power. A few
exceptional coal trains are two miles long.

When something linear is draped across a great deal of landscape, it
will be required to go uphill and downhill simultaneously if it tries
to move at all. It crosses a summit, and its front begins descending
while the rest is still climbing. If it is a coal train and there is a
restricted-speed zone down ahead, many thousands of tons will strain
the dynamic brakes while many thousands of other tons still need a
great deal of applied power. Between North Platte, Nebraska, and
Marysville, Kansas, a scene exactly fitting that description was a
two-mile eastbound rise that led to an overpass where Union Pacific
crossed the Burlington Northern Santa Fe in Hastings, Nebraska. The
restricted-speed zone was half a mile down the far side. Scott had to
deal with the antithetical stresses of the "train action" by continuing
to apply positive power and simultaneously introducing what manuals
call "brake propagation." This was possible only with distributed
power, and he had long since "thrown the fence," desynchronizing the
locomotives at the two ends of the train. The computer screen in front
of him that related to power was now split by a vertical bar between
the data of the front locomotives and the data from the rear unit,
which was still pushing while the lead units were down in the dynamic
brakes.

This was a place where a train could "get knuckles" (break couplers),
and U.P. trains, in fact, had got six knuckles on Hastings Hill since
Christmas. This is Scott's description of what was happening now: "You
have to be within one throttle notch up or down with head-for example,
two dynamic on the head end would allow throttle 1, 2, or 3 on the DP.
It is not against the rules to be in dynamic brake 8 on the DP and 2 on
the head end, but common sense will tell you that there is a
possibility of pulling your train in two. There's a
twenty-five-mile-an-hour slow order at Kicks Road, which is only about
half a mile from the top of this hill. In order to get a
hundred-and-thirty-three-car loaded coal train-nineteen thousand tons,
DPU-over the hill without breaking in two, what you need to do is you
need to have the rear DP unit shoving in about Notch 1, and you need to
control the slack with the lead two DPs in dynamic, and you'll have to
hold that train back at fifty-mile-an-hour until you reach the bottom,
and then you need to be shoving with the DP in the eighth run to push
the slack against the head end in order to come over that hill at
twenty-five-mile-an-hour and keep the slack bunched in so it doesn't
break in two."

It didn't.

By 7 p.m., with our headlight drilling darkness, CNAMR was going fast
enough to explode a rooster, feathers everywhere, like a shower of
sparks. A "rooster" in this context was a cock pheasant, which flew
nose-to-nose into a thirty-eight-million-pound coal train. Minutes
later, on the microwave radio, we heard a westbound train report to the
dispatcher that the train in front of us, an eastbound manifest, was
throwing real sparks from its twenty-seventh car from the rear. Signals
flashed yellow. The train in front of us was ten miles down the track,
and to Paul and Scott its situation brought a single thought: If we get
stuck behind this manifest, our time will run out and our own train
will die. Scott began moving the throttle down through the notches and
into the dynamics. Within twenty-five hundred yards, he had brought
CNAMR to a complete stop. If he had crept along, drifting, as he could
have under the flashing yellow signals, he might have crept into a
block so close to the stricken train that the dispatcher would not be
able to get him around it. So Scott was preserving distance. The
dispatcher was in Omaha-a hundred and twelve miles away, measured with
a string-but he was in charge of all signals, all switches, and all
movement of trains in many tens of miles before and behind us.

The signal structures over the tracks loomed black and nearly invisible
now, but their lights had taken on a planetary brilliance-green,
flashing yellow, yellow, red, and lunar (the high white that tells you
you can creep past red). These same colors, stretched into long
horizontal lines, were lighting up a wall in Omaha as if it were the
wall of a disco. Trains in Arizona, California, Missouri, and Colorado
were also running in patterns expressed on this wall, and on the wall
opposite-the two sides of a narrow, tunnel-like room three hundred feet
long. Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah-in all, about nineteen thousand
miles of the Union Pacific were under control from within these walls,
in the space known to the company as the Harriman Dispatching Center
and to the people who work there as "the bunker."

It looks like one-theatrically dark, below grade, the caverned core of
a two-story building, and reinforced with such redundant masonry that
it is rated to withstand "the force of a telephone pole hitting it at a
hundred and eighty miles per hour," an assertion that in this part of
the country is not immune from testing. The bunker calls to mind
Mission Control in Houston, but even louder is the echo of those old
films about the Strategic Air Command zapping the hell out of the
Soviet Union from a deeply inhumed command center in Omaha. Four
hundred dispatchers work at Harriman, about sixty at any given time.
They wear ball caps that say things like "Dad to the Bone." Fingers on
keyboards, feet on radio pedals, earphones under the caps, they sit at
consoles in partitioned cubicles looking down into as many as eight
computer screens and up at the colored lines-the sometimes flashing
bands-on the walls. The lines are tracks, and some of the colors are
rolling trains. If a paid inmate or a college student were to be
brought here to undergo clinical psychological testing, he'd be
babbling in the street in thirty minutes. Dispatchers have left
Harriman to go into air-traffic control, imagining a simpler life. In
the words of John Reininger, a supervisor in the bunker, "Air-traffic
controllers have the great luxury of another dimension. Air-traffic
controllers find this more complicated. We'd like to have a train
change its altitude to get over another train-it won't work."

A raised axial platform, supervisory in nature, is flanked on either
side by a hundred yards of dispatchers, sitting in their cubicles,
about five feet lower. Each is separated by clear partitions from
neighbors left and right, whose territories are adjacent and average
three hundred miles. Crew-change points will often coincide with the
edges of dispatchers' territories. In rear projection, the
polychromatic representation of the railroad on the wall directly ahead
of each dispatcher depicts what is going on in the dispatcher's
territory, and a glance to the left or the right shows the traffic that
is approaching. If something is flashing, it needs attention; and
something is generally a train, for which the dispatcher is clearing
the way. In Reininger's words, "He owns the track, so to speak."

The multiple lines of color representing trains and tracks are not
everywhere parallel. Where tracks converge, as at Gibbon Junction, the
lines assume swastika patterns and the wall resembles a Navajo blanket.
Where a stretch of track is occupied by a train, it is lighted bright
red. Where a stretch of track has nothing on it and will not have for a
while, it is white. A computer is thinking about it. Green track is
clear for imminent use. Brown is for manual mode, computer uninvited. A
computer has planned a train's experiences two or three hours ahead of
the train. The dispatcher watches the plan as it unfolds, and overrides
it if necessary, whereupon the relevant stretch of track on the wall
turns brown. Malfunctioning switches appear as vertical blue
rectangles, like small postage stamps. Specific symbols represent
specific trains. Small arrows show plotted directions. Small "H"s
represent switch heaters. Such is the detail that on the axial platform
a supervisor lifts a pair of binoculars to look over a dispatcher's
shoulder and scan the rear-projection wall fifteen feet in front of
her. Dispatchers at Harriman have spent entire careers on one stretch
of track. If a coal train is making a very long trip from mine to
plant, as many as a dozen dispatchers will see it through. Dispatchers
have in their hands the safety not only of train crews but also of
track workers, not to mention the surrounding public. After twelve
weeks of classes, they are trained on the job for about three months.
It takes them five years to become really efficient. Above each
dispatcher's cubicle is a red strobe light set on a shaft like a torch.
If a crisis develops in a dispatcher's territory, the red light begins
to flash so that everyone in the general area will see it if the
dispatcher is off peeing.

Some television directors look at fewer monitors than dispatchers do.
Dispatchers' screens in the bunker can display data from trackside
sensors and scanners. They chart winds and flash floods. Any emergency
situation will cause a window describing it to pop up on a screen. As
snow falls anywhere in Harriman's nineteen thousand miles, switch
heaters are turned on from Harriman.

Under Centralized Traffic Control, you can run a train on any track in
any direction. You can run three trains side by side all headed west on
the Triple-Track Main. Where the trackage is wired for C.T.C., signals
are all two-sided. I remember riding in a Metroliner in Maryland and
standing in the front of the front car, where-through two windows-I
could see the track ahead. Over the engineer's shoulder, I could see,
lit up, a digital readout of the train's speed. The engineer was
wearing a tie. There were four tracks. Gradually, the Metroliner had
drifted to its left and now it was flying south at the left-hand
extreme, on what is customarily a northbound track, at a hundred and
eleven miles an hour. A pickup in front of us ran a gated crossing. We
missed the pickup. On down the far-left track, we were soon looking
directly into the headlight of a locomotive. We kept going. Somewhat
shy of the headlight, the Metroliner slipped over to the next track,
and shot past the other train. Centralized Traffic Control.

Under C.T.C., the dispatcher at his console controls all movement, and
can set all signals and throw all switches. The system involves
microwave towers, satellites, and fibre optics (strung along the tracks
like the nineteenth century's telegraph wires). Train orders and track
warrants used to be presented on actual paper given to the crew. Where
they needed to, they stopped the train, walked ahead, threw switches by
hand, and made signals with their arms in varied configurations, like
football referees. A fist to the forehead was trainspeak for headlight.
If you cupped both hands over your breasts, you were talking about a
tank car. As with hand-swung red lanterns, all that was replaced by the
block-signal system, which remains in operation in a lot of terrain.
Blocks average two miles. If something is stalled four blocks ahead of
you, you go from green to flashing yellow to yellow to red. Under block
signals, a fast train coming up behind a slow train has no alternative
but to slow up and follow. Under C.T.C., a fast train can go around a
slow train. Trackage still exists that has neither C.T.C. nor a
block-signal system. The term for it is "dark territory." In dark
territory, all instructions-even train orders-are verbal via microwave
radio. Coal trains on the old Rock Island branch between Fairbury and
Hallam, Nebraska, are in dark territory. They must receive a track
warrant by radio from the bunker, and must give the track warrant back
to the dispatcher when they leave dark territory. The town of Hallam
not long ago was utterly destroyed by a tornado. All that was left was
the power plant, at the dead end of dark territory.

In 1969, I went to Campbell County, Wyoming, with Floyd Elgin Dominy,
who-decades earlier-had started his career there as a county agent
advising ranchers, who were fighting severe and sustained drought, to
build small dams and impound water in stock ponds. Dominy had risen to
become U.S. Commissioner of Reclamation, the agency in the Department
of the Interior which impounds water for as much as two hundred miles
behind such constructions as Glen Canyon Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, Flaming
Gorge Dam, Hoover Dam. Proudly, he drove the swelling grasslands of the
high, dry range, while I scribbled airy notes about the "wide,
expansive landscape, the beguiling patterns of perspective, the
unending buttes, flat or nippled, spaced out to the horizon like stone
chessmen." The grasses stirred under the wind and the range seemed
uninhabited farther than the eye could see, but the ranchers in 1969
were still tucked into the draws, and their cattle were drinking from a
thousand ponds. Dominy had lived in a stone dugout with his wife and
infant daughter. For heat and cooking, they had a coal-burning stove.
Dominy dug the coal himself out of a hillside.

The Orin Line, known locally as the Coal Line, is in Campbell and
Converse counties, Wyoming. It was cut through Thunder Basin National
Grassland and now includes among its branches the branch to Black
Thunder Mine. Where people like Dominy dug, by hand, coal that no one
else much wanted, draglines the size of naval ships are exposing it
now. On CTSBT, I mentioned that I meant to revisit Campbell County some
day soon, to go where CTSBT goes, and to see the Powder River Basin (of
which Thunder Basin is a part) as it has come to appear in the
twenty-first century. Scott, who drives more than a million tons of
coal from North Platte to Marysville per year, said he had never seen
the source of the coal and had long been curious to go there. What was
I doing "the day after tomorrow?" We could drive up to the Coal Line in
his car and maybe catch a train into a mine. The mine turns in the
southern Powder River Basin begin and end at Bill, Wyoming, and that
was no big deal or distance from North Platte-not much over three
hundred miles.

In his Suburban, we were barely nine miles from his home when we
approached the tracks at Birdwood, the west end of Bailey Yard. Lights
flashed, gates dropped in front of us, and we watched the arriving
headlight of a coal train. "Son of a bitch!" Scott complained. In no
great hurry, the mile and a half of train went by, then a second son of
a bitch came along before the first one cleared.

We went northwest on roads that were almost always close to tracks.
Scott never looked at a map or paid much attention to road signs,
but-to see where he was-he looked routinely at railroad mileposts. At
another grade crossing, another coal train stopped us. We entered
Wyoming in a freezing rain. In the B.N.S.F. yard at Guernsey were ten
parallel coal trains. Through the rain, we saw sunlight on snow of the
Laramie Range. Before long, the rain against our windshield turned into
snow. North of Lightning Creek, the pump jacks of oil fields dotted the
range. Bill had a regional school in a double-wide trailer, four kids
in the school. As if Bill were pretending that it was not the only town
in four thousand square miles, the school, the post office, the general
store, and Dry Creek Community Hall were closely clustered. The post
office, 82631, was boarded up, the Zip Code defunct. The town's
resident population was one-the storekeeper. Sitting in Bill's railroad
yard as we arrived were eight miles of coal trains.

Scott arranged for us to deadhead on CCTBT, coming from St. Clair,
Michigan, and going to Black Thunder Mine. The train was scheduled to
leave Bill at seven-forty in the morning, with David L. Morgan,
conductor, and Eric M. Renstrom, engineer. At seven-forty in the
morning, we had all been waiting in the crew locker room for upward of
an hour, but no call was forthcoming for CCTBT. An hour later, there
had still been no call for CCTBT, or for any other train. About a dozen
crewmen were waiting, gathering the minutes of their twelve hours. The
dialogue might have been coming off a circular tape:

"****ing CRZ-can't remember ****."

"Today is National Pick-on-Tom Day."

"****. I can take it."

"****ing CRZ-can't remember ****."

There was writing over a urinal in the grouting of a cinder-block wall:
"Republicans Like to Cornhole Each Others + Wives + Chickens." Some of
the guys wore chains on their boots to deal with winter. There was a
lot of Mephistophelian facial hair-the caterpillar sideburns, the full
beard, the mustache as bilateral semaphore.

Dave Morgan said, "Welcome to the Coal Line. Meaning you wait, and
wait. Daytime dispatchers are a pain in the ass." And he laughed. Then,
referring to the day's traffic, he added, "We've got about a hundred
trains in here as we speak." And he laughed. Dave was a big guy,
handsome-six-three-with a cavernous voice; and the laugh was explosive,
like a chain saw starting up. The saw had a problem in its fuel line,
always choking out as abruptly as it started, as if he threw a switch
in mid-yok. He wore jeans, a jean jacket. His thick brown hair was
parted near the middle. He said he had waited in the locker room as
much as eleven hours and thirty minutes to be called to a train.

Mary Ellen Sherwin, an engineer, came into the room. She had waited
from 9:50 p.m. until 1:50 a.m. the night before, and had then driven a
train to and from Belle Ayr Mine. Sixty-six years old with long white
hair, she wore jeans, a jean jacket, and under her jacket a V-neck
cotton sweater with horizontal grays and whites like the broadened
stripes of a railroad hat from the days of steam. Addressing Dave
Morgan, she remarked, "You asshole."

Dave replied, "That's Mister Asshole to you."

She said, "Where are you going?"

He said, "Thunder."

She had grown up on a ranch northeast of Bill, and now lived in
Douglas, thirty-five miles south. She left for home.

When she had gone, Dave said, "They don't make enough jeweller's rouge
to polish off her edges."

After four hours, a crewman spoke of "waiting on the railroad, all the
livelong day." At ten-fifty-seven, the address system finally mentioned
Dave's and Eric's train. Three minutes later, we were in the cab. At
eleven-fifteen, we moved, into a whiteout fog.

If you would like to torture someone, either drip water on him for
thirty-six hours or take him up the Coal Line. Eric stopped at a red
signal where the yard tracks of Bill met the main roadbed. On a turn of
ninety miles, we had travelled a train-length, a mile and a half. The
dispatchers who were controlling the movements of every train on the
line were in B.N.S.F.'s dispatching center in Fort Worth, Texas. Ours
spoke often and even hopefully to Eric and Dave, but there was nothing
she could do. The line belonged jointly to the two largest railroads in
America, and so many coal trains from so many places were there to
collect the coal that the congestion had gone critical and the line was
arteriosclerotic. Not that we could see the other trains. For ninety
minutes, we stared forward at two red dots in fog.

Dave Morgan said, "As long as we don't see something going by us going
into Thunder, we're O.K." Each train is a "slot." Mine to mine on the
Orin Line, railroads work out loading slots, like airlines sharing an
airport. At twelve-fifty-eight, a light turned yellow and we moved.
Looking up at the signal, Dave said, "You got to have faith that that
son of a bitch ain't lying to you, ha-haha-h . . ." and we slid onto
the main, heading north up the leftmost of the three tracks under
Centralized Traffic Control. And soon we were flying, or so it seemed,
crossing the Dry Fork of the Cheyenne at twenty miles an hour.

The virtual voice of a trackside scanner addressed the interior of the
cab, saying, "No dee fex. Temm purr ah choor fiff teen duh grees." The
fog densened. A headlight suddenly appeared in it and we were meeting a
coal train coming down from Caballo, a small mine by Powder River
standards, yet larger than every mine in the East. The train had made
fifty-seven miles in ten and a half hours, but it was speeding up some
and went by us in nine minutes.

The roadbed was visible enough, and Scott Davis remarked that we were
looking at a state-of-the-art railroad-triple track with crossovers,
concrete ties, the ballast so neatly bevelled that it looked like a new
driveway. Wood ties are still in use elsewhere, and are more flexible,
but concrete ties are what you want if you are annually running over
them four hundred million gross tons of coal trains. (Not readily
visible was the great quantity of coal dust that had filled in the
ballast and, in months to come, would cause a couple of derailments by
impeding the drainage of unusual rains.)

At one-thirty, we were stopped again, for what turned out to be ninety
minutes. We had gone seven miles. "Fluidity" is perhaps the most
hallowed word in railroad operations. The Santa Monica Freeway between
Sepulveda and La Cienega is more fluid than the Orin Line between Bill
and Belle Ayr. Think of Bay Bridge traffc backed up to Sacramento,
think bumper-to-bumper backward from the New Jersey Palisades to the
Mississippi River. Dave and Eric, sitting back, had their legs draped
across their consoles. I had to look over their toes to stare, and
stare, and stare at the red signals, in every moment wanting and
expecting them to turn. With C.T.C., the fog was only a symbolic
factor. Dave said, "It feels like we're all alone out here but we've
probably got sixty to seventy trains on the tracks up ahead. This is
what it's like on the Coal Line. At least they didn't fix you up with
nothing bogus. Ha-ha-ha-h . . ."

Eric went out the rear door of the cab and along the catwalk to the
second unit, where he picked up a TV dinner he was cooking in the heat
between the turbo and the main engine block. Until recently a
conductor, Eric was a new engineer. With a full helmet of light-brown
hair, fine features, alert eyes, he resembled the film idol Robert
Redford but was better-looking. As he ate, he said, slowly and quietly,
"I still have to learn how to get a handle on the stress side of it,
trying to find a happy medium between caring too much and too little."

"We're parked," Dave said, his voice less optimistic than the trackside
scanner's. Turning to the economics of the situation, he added, "We're
really nothing. We're pretty much the plankton of the whole picture.
Ha-ha."

An empty beaner drifted by-EMHKBTM-on its way from Tennessee to Black
Thunder Mine. In other words, something was going by us going into
Thunder. A beaner is a B.N.S.F. train. "E" for empty, in its B.N.S.F.
seven-letter name. Beaners kept appearing: CCAMSLP, on its way from
Caballo Mine to Smithers Lake, in Texas; ECEBATM, returning to Antelope
Mine from a plant in southern Illinois that no longer uses Illinois
coal. B.N.S.F. is made up of the collective remains of the Chicago,
Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the Great Northern Railway, and the
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. A fallen flag is a railroad that no
longer exists. In the eye of the beholder is whether B.N.S.F. is a
streamlined modern enterprise or a bouquet of fallen flags. Either way,
it is America's second-longest railroad, and its recumbent flags also
include Spokane, Portland and Seattle; Northern Pacific; and St.
Louis-San Francisco, the old Frisco line.

If you develop a monopoly on the railroads in Monopoly, you are holding
four fallen flags. Since the breakup of Conrail, in 1999, most of the
old Eastern railroads are parts of Norfolk Southern or parts of CSX.
Illinois Central is a fallen flag. It is part of Canadian National.
These train mergers are like bluefish wars. Southern Pacific, which
nearly merged with the Santa Fe, was consumed by Union Pacific in 1996.
The modern Union Pacific is actually a consolidation of eight or ten
railroads-a network, and more like a communications grid than a
straight-line railroad. Its antiquarium of fallen flags also includes
the Missouri Pacific, the Western Pacific, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas
Railroad (Katy line), and the Chicago & North Western, which was
struggling to build the Orin Line when U.P. came along with its mouth
wide open. As Paul Fitzpatrick had summarized all this, "The U.P. went
from a family-type company to a military-type company with the mergers,
but we finally got them to think a little bit like what we think they
should."

Around 3 p.m., a loaded U.P. coal train, coming down from the Antelope
Mine, went by us on the middle track. Of the two red dots we were
staring at, one above the other, the upper one related to the track we
were on. The lower one was there to indicate a diversion route. The
lower one turned yellow but resembled gold. After Eric put the throttle
in Notch 1, we actually moved, crossing over from Track 3 to Track 2.

Traced from a map, the Coal Line has the raceme structure of a bluebell
or a lily of the valley, as dainty an image as nature can provide for a
stem whose flowers are coal mines. Black Thunder Junction, 5:45 p.m.,
nineteen degrees, dark, snowing.

Eight miles into Black Thunder, the branch line ended in a great loop,
where the long train would pass through a loading silo while swinging
around to go back the other way. Going into Thunder, we approached a
switch that was closed but should have been open. What to do? Leaving
the cab, Dave said, "I go over and flop the switch. This is known as a
one-eyed crossover."

Crossed over, we soon stopped, as ordered, near a footbridge, before
going over a scale. The snow was heavy now, like bugs filling up our
headlight beam, but through the swarm we could see the silo, as large
as a twenty-five-story office building, sheathed in light. Eric took
the lead locomotive over the scale at 1.5 miles per hour, then went up
to 3.5 for the rest of the train. Reading the tare weights on a screen
in the cab, Dave said, "This is a pretty consistent consist." While the
hoppers behind us were crossing the scale, we went under a conveyor
belt that was carrying coal from a remote pit into the silo complex.
The belt was three miles long. From nearer pits, coal was being brought
in by haul trucks too large to share the name with anything else called
a truck. Their tires looked the way bagels would look to a virus. Black
Thunder was working four pits, and the whole spread of it was far too
extensive to be comprehended from a train, but Scott Davis and I had
driven around the basin after we arrived.

The mines were mapped in blocks: "West Overburden. Middle Overburden.
East Overburden. Coal." The pits were excavated canyons. They were a
couple of hundred feet deep and two and three miles long. The walking
draglines gnawing at the overburden needed tall rigid masts to help
support their four-chord booms. They were eight stories tall and
weighed four hundred tons. Their booms were hundreds of feet long. Like
the locomotives that would haul the coal away, the walking draglines
required electric power. Their walk was a saurian heave, an exponential
lurch, friction smoke rising from the ground around them. As they
walked-dug-walked-dug their way up the coal seams, their tails dragged
along behind them. The tails were cables six inches thick delivering
electrical power made with coal to draglines digging coal. We saw three
D11 bulldozers shoving overburden to the edge of a canyon and over the
side, going back for more overburden, and returning to the lip, always
stopping a foot or two short of a two-hundred-foot plunge.

Scott said, "I thought railroads were dangerous, but, man, these coal
mines are really dangerous." In the presence of nineteen-thousand-ton
trains, three-hundred-ton haul trucks, and hundred-ton bulldozers
moving on unstable ground, blasts are routine and rocks fall like
bombs.

"Those big trucks could back over a pickup and not even know it," Scott
said.

The pickups knew it. They carried whip antennas twenty feet high with
bright-red lights at the top.

The faces of the canyon walls were for the most part jet black-beds of
coal eight to ten stories thick. With distance westward toward the
Bighorns, the seams go deeper under the overburden. In fifty more years
of westward digging and filling, the seams may be too deep to mine, at
least in the way that they are mined now. At that point, the Powder
River Basin will still contain-at the rate of sixty loaded coal trains
a day-enough coal for two hundred years. It began as peat in Paleocene
bogs about sixty million years before the present.

We had seen old ranch buildings falling into the ground, and a few
cattle standing up. A sign: "Livestock at Large." Windmills were still
pumping water for cattle. To the horizons, there were no trees. Deer
and antelope were everywhere at play, much too young to care what had
happened to the range.

About six months before the present, I read Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red
Mars," a heralded work of science fiction that describes the
colonization and mineral exploitation of the fourth planet. Robinson's
characters excavate Mars with backhoes, front-end loaders, tractors,
graders, and "one John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer,
hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semiautonomous, fully
programmable." There are "giant dump trucks . . . full of black
boulders."

" 'Monsters like this are all over the planet,' he said to Nadia. . . .
'Cutting, scraping, digging, filling . . .' "

The monsters are "equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations,
their decision algorithms handling the details," while human operators
peer at screens.

" 'Watch your screens, you lazy *******s!' "

Colonials from "rich northern countries" mine the Great Escarpment and
"the island mesas of Nilosyrtis." One of their pits is "a kilometer in
diameter, seven kilometers deep." They use the "Allied hydraulic impact
hammer," and they "drill cased holes through large boulders" with the
Sandvik Tubex boring machine.

"The train to Burroughs carried mostly freight, thirty narrow cars of
it . . . running over a superconducting magnetic piste." Between Earth
and Mars, strings of orbiting vehicles, also called trains, come and go
in "a continuous procession" run by "a large force of local traffic
controllers."

And now CCTBT was about to turn into CBTCT. Its nose was close to the
silo. It was moving steadily at .4 miles per hour. Scott Davis and I
went out of the cab and back along the catwalk in the noise and the
snow, stepping over to the second unit, and continuing along its
catwalk to the far end, because the second unit was facing backward. We
got into the cab there and watched. Next to us was the first of a
hundred and thirty-four empty hoppers. The looming silo was something
like a grain elevator, reaching out with great arms to the crushers
that supplied it. Moving inside, the lead locomotives passed three
control booths, whose bay windows were not entirely black with dust. As
the first hopper drew abreast of a booth, a pair of steel sheets was
lowered from above, coffering the interior of the car in the way that a
dentist places baffles around a tooth he's about to fill. Then coal
dropped, explosively, between the sheets. A hundred and fifteen
measured tons fell into the gondola in one second. A six-kiloton cloud
shot up into the silo's black interior. Under the crash of coal, the
aluminum gondola staggered, wrenched downward, and looked as if it
might flatten. From above, the baffles were lifted. The coal in the
hopper was maybe five feet above the rims, a calculated fluff that
would settle down. At .4 miles per hour, the second gondola was now in
position. The baffles came down, and the coal fell. Crunch, cloud, and
the next car was in position. Emerging from the silo on a slight curve,
we watched twenty cars totter in the dust under the weight of falling
coal before the interior of the silo passed out of sight, with more
than a mile of gondolas to follow.

We were scarcely eastbound off the loop when Dave's and Eric's time,
under the hours-of-service law, ran out. Eric stopped the loaded coal
train. We all descended. A fresh crew got on, and the van that had
brought them carried us away, past a very large sign that said:

THUNDER BASIN COAL COMPANY

Welcome to BLACK THUNDER MINE

Don't get caught in the web of unsafe acts

In the Powder River Basin, a congestion of trains may be tedious while
you're in it, the railroading seemingly inefficient, but that is just
an illusion lit up in red signals. The place is not as organized as an
anthill, no; but it is something like one. From the mines along the
Orin Line, twenty-three thousand coal trains annually emerge-that is,
about thirty-four thousand miles of rolling coal, going off as units to
become carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, water, ash, and
heat, and to air-condition a population so needful of comfort that the
demand for the coal is greater in summer than in winter.

Here is one example chosen not at random but for its distance and size:
Coming and going, loaded and empty, thirty-five sets-thirty-five
dedicated unit coal trains-are in almost perpetual motion between the
Powder River Basin and Georgia's Plant Scherer, twenty miles from
Macon. There is a loop at each end, eighteen hundred miles between.
Owned by a consortium led by Georgia Power, Plant Scherer, in megawatts
produced, is the largest coal-fired power plant in the Western
Hemisphere. It pays more than anyone else for the transportation of
Powder River coal, and not long ago B.N.S.F. snatched the contract from
Union Pacific.

Trains with names like CBTMMHS go down to Guernsey and then cross
Nebraska and drop through Missouri to the Ozarks, where they test
tonnage versus horsepower on 1.5-per-cent grades. B.N.S.F. had to
lengthen its sidings and fix up its track for the coal trains, as did
Norfolk Southern, which absorbs the trains at Memphis. New crews take
their turns from Memphis to Sheffield, and Sheffield to Chattanooga,
and Chattanooga to Atlanta's Inman Yard. The run from Inman and back to
Inman via Lamar County is known inside the trains as the Scherer turn.

By the grade crossing in Juliette, Georgia, a fried-green-tomato
sandwich is as good as it is famous at the Whistle Stop Cafe. On a
freezing winter day, when the temperatures in Georgia were not much
milder than they were in Wyoming, I had a fried-green-tomato sandwich
for lunch with my longtime friend Sam Candler, of Sharpsburg, Georgia,
and Joe Fulford, a Norfolk Southern trainmaster, and Adam Crate, whose
title was Road Foreman of Engines.

Close to the Ocmulgee River, Juliette is a hamlet in the pinewoods-a
cluster of houses near the grade crossing by the trackside cafe. In the
early nineteen-nineties, the town flashed with borrowed vividness after
Hollywood used it as an on-location set for a memoir that included a
steam locomotive coming through the pines and killing a young man whose
foot had been caught and wedged in the rails near the Whistle Stop
Cafe, which looks to this day as it did in the movie.

I was still enjoying my fried-green species of BLT when the nose of a
locomotive appeared in a window and stopped. Its presence in this place
was no less incongruous than the appearance of Chief Red Cloud at New
York's Cooper Union to deliver an address in Sioux. Instead of a modest
Norfolk Southern locomotive, there from the mountain West on this
antebellum single track sat Burlington Northern Santa Fe 5639, color of
reddish wheat, with seven thousand feet of coal behind it in the trees.
Lee Stuckey was the engineer, Brian Nix the conductor-Inman to Inman,
the Scherer turn. On a yellow slip above Lee Stuckey's head were the
initials of Black Thunder Mine.

Over wooden ties, we went down through the loblollies in a narrow
series of S curves, the trees so tight to the train that on this clear
day visibility from the cab did not extend much farther than it had in
the fog in Wyoming. More forest curves eventually led to a long left
where we could look back at the beginnings of CBTMMHS's hundred and
twenty-four cars. Then, to our left, we passed a long yard with five
parallel tracks, where five coal trains could, if necessary, be parked,
or "staged," waiting to advance and drop their coal at Plant Scherer.
That should have suggested the dimensions of the scene to follow, but
the significance of the yard did not really register with me, and the
surprise was near total when we bent around a long curve and the dense
curtain of pines seemed to open theatrically from left to right,
revealing a loop of track at least a mile in circumference around an
infield filled with a million tons of coal (earthmovers and bulldozers
crawling like insects on the coal), and, on the far side of the loop, a
trestle forty feet in the air and eight hundred feet long, and behind
the trestle a pair of rectangular buildings a quarter of a mile over
the ground and close to three hundred feet high but dwarfed beneath the
overbearing immensity of four hyperbolic cooling towers that came into
view one at a time, their broad flared rims five hundred feet above the
ground, and two smokestacks a thousand feet high, reaching above the
scene like minarets. It was an electrical Xanadu in homage to a craven
need, its battlements emitting cumuli of steam.

After being switched to the right at the top of the loop, we started
around it counterclockwise. Coal trains are so heavy that they are
routed through the loop in alternate directions, to distribute the
assault on the track. In the infield to our left were five hundred
acres of Campbell County, Wyoming, fifty feet deep-the million-ton
reserve known at Plant Scherer as the "pile." CBTMMHS circumscribed the
pile until-close by Plant Scherer-it stopped at the head of the
unloading trestle, which extended before it between rows of bright
lights. This train had left Wyoming five days ago. Plant Scherer would
burn everything in it in less than eight hours.

Sam and I descended from the cab, the better to watch the unloading.
Like the New Jersey Turnpike high over the Meadowlands, the trestle was
supported on concrete croquet wickets that divided the space below it
into twenty-one bays. Between yellow railings, the red-orange
locomotive began to move onto the trestle, followed by stainless
hoppers heaped with coal. Bin doors opened in the bottom of the first
car, and, in three or four seconds, down through the trestle fell a
hundred and fifteen tons of coal. The sound was nearly as explosive as
the sound of the filling had been in Wyoming. At some plants, coal cars
are rolled over-literally flipped on swivel couplings-but such rotary
dumping, spectacular as it may be, is too slow for a place like Plant
Scherer, which Jeremy Taylor, an authority on coal trains, has called
"the most efficient unloading operation in the country," with its
trestle, its electric contact points, its compressed-air opening of the
hopper doors. The train was moving at three miles an hour, and the cars
were unloading like sticks of bombs. The coal was mounding in the bays.
As each load began to drop, a geyser of dust shot upward from the car.
Down in the bays, the dust coming off the fallen coal spread out in a
thick black cloud. There were sprayers to diminish the dust but the
sprayers were frozen. Sam had radically changed. His face had
blackened. His beard was much younger. Now the locomotive stopped hard
to shake up frozen coal. In the bays of the trestle, mountains quickly
grew, and big yellow Cats did what they could to smooth them. As coal
floods the bays, it can fill them high enough to derail the train.
After the locomotive had gone far past the end of the trestle, the cars
kept coming and the geysers kept rising. The uncontrollable dust far
below had the look of an occurring disaster, the spreading clouds dark
and flat as if they were derived from incendiary bombs.

Plant Scherer can unload a coal train in thirty minutes but seldom
does. If Plant Scherer takes more than four hours to unload a coal
train, it pays Norfolk Southern a demurrage fee. Norfolk Southern, for
its part, has seventy hours to get the train from the Mississippi River
to Plant Scherer and back, or Norfolk Southern pays a demurrage fee.
Cars may have to be set out because of freezing-hopper doors frozen,
the coal in solid blocks like frozen peas.

Coal under the trestle in forty-foot dunes soon filled all twenty-one
bays. Sprinklers were finally thawed. A rainbow hung in a drifting
black cloud. Like a chambered nautilus, the train had come back upon
itself and was now completely annular. At the far side of the great
loop, the lead locomotive was all but touching the hoppers that were
still arriving.

Under the trestle, a chute was carrying the coal off to be crushed and
then pulverized and then mixed with air for immediate burning, in the
way that an automobile engine mixes air with gasoline and explodes the
vapor. Pulverization helps make it possible to burn the coal at a
temperature low enough to limit nitrous oxide, and the fireballs don't
get much hotter than three thousand degrees. The heat, of course, boils
water-eighty-one million gallons of Ocmulgee River water a day-in
boilers twenty-five stories tall. Steam from the boiling water turns
four generators lined up in a single room a quarter of a mile long.

Damon Woodson, a mechanical engineer at Plant Scherer who had worked in
a nuclear power plant, said, "I never really understood nuclear until I
came here." That million-ton pile on reserve in the train loop was
equivalent to one truckful of mined uranium, he said. "The way to go is
nuclear if you want to have power. To get a million BTUs, fuel oil
costs nine dollars, natural gas six dollars, coal a dollar-eighty-five,
nuclear fifty cents. We'll see how it all turns out."

Plant Scherer burns nearly thirteen hundred coal trains a year-two
thousand miles of coal cars, twelve million tons of the bedrock of
Wyoming. It unloads, on average, three and a half coal trains a day. On
a wall inside the plant are pictures of yellow finches, turkey
vultures, and other local wildlife on Plant Scherer's twelve thousand
acres of land. Asked why Plant Scherer needs twelve thousand acres (six
miles by three miles), Woodson answered readily, "Because we are
thinking of expanding."

(This is the second part of a two-part article.)

Very good story.

He missed a decimal point, though - three 4400 HP diesel locomotives equal
13 thousand, not 13 hundred, horsepower.


--
Gerry
http://www.pbase.com/gfoley9999/
http://www.wilowud.net/
http://home.columbus.rr.com/gfoley
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian...ypt/egypt.html

"Gerard M Foley" writes:

Very good story.

He missed a decimal point, though - three 4400 HP diesel
locomotives equal 13 thousand, not 13 hundred, horsepower.

And the comparison of AC vs. DC locomotives was not all
that well made. Saying that it takes fewer 4500 HP
AC locomotives than 1500 HP DC locomotives isn't exactly
a startling revelation and doesn't make a case for AC.

Speaking of AC, are the engineers given any better
go control than the 8 discrete steps of the DC locos?
Surely after 100 years, something better than the old
trolley stepper controllers can be had.

Everett M. Greene wrote:
"Gerard M Foley" writes:


Very good story.

He missed a decimal point, though - three 4400 HP diesel
locomotives equal 13 thousand, not 13 hundred, horsepower.


And the comparison of AC vs. DC locomotives was not all
that well made. Saying that it takes fewer 4500 HP
AC locomotives than 1500 HP DC locomotives isn't exactly
a startling revelation and doesn't make a case for AC.

Speaking of AC, are the engineers given any better
go control than the 8 discrete steps of the DC locos?
Surely after 100 years, something better than the old
trolley stepper controllers can be had.

AC locomotives tend to have better traction control and
a higher tractive effort for a given horsepower. Thus, they
can haul heavier loads. Of course, hauling a heavier load
with the same horsepower means running at lower speeds.

Greg Gritton

Greg Gritton writes:
Everett M. Greene wrote:
"Gerard M Foley" writes:

Very good story.

He missed a decimal point, though - three 4400 HP diesel
locomotives equal 13 thousand, not 13 hundred, horsepower.

And the comparison of AC vs. DC locomotives was not all
that well made. Saying that it takes fewer 4500 HP
AC locomotives than 1500 HP DC locomotives isn't exactly
a startling revelation and doesn't make a case for AC.

Speaking of AC, are the engineers given any better
go control than the 8 discrete steps of the DC locos?
Surely after 100 years, something better than the old
trolley stepper controllers can be had.

AC locomotives tend to have better traction control and
a higher tractive effort for a given horsepower. Thus, they
can haul heavier loads. Of course, hauling a heavier load
with the same horsepower means running at lower speeds.

Tractive effort is the amount of the driving power
available that can be transferred to a horizontal
pulling/pushing power. This is to a very high degee
a function of the weight on the drive wheels times
the coefficient of friction. AC doesn't have anything
to do with this.

As I understand/surmise, AC locomotives are AC only
in the generating side and are pulsed DC on the drive
side. This leaves open the possibility of measuring
the drive motor speed between pulses and compensating
for any detected slippage. Thus, the AC locomotives
can automagically better apply the available power to
driving force up to the tractive effort limit.

(Everett M. Greene) wrote:

Speaking of AC, are the engineers given any better
go control than the 8 discrete steps of the DC locos?
Surely after 100 years, something better than the old
trolley stepper controllers can be had.

Eight throttle steps are still provided. They don't really need any more
than that.