On the road again - Ely, Nevada

In May during an RV trip that included parts of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada I was able to visit a rail museum that I had been wanting to visit for a long time, The Nevada Northern Railway in Ely, Nevada.  Ely is located along US 50 which has been labeled "the loneliest road in America".  We had passed through Ely once about 30 years ago and at that time visited the abandoned Kennecott copper pit which was why this railroad was built back in the early 1900's.

One of the impressive things about this particular museum how much property and buildings it includes.  This was all donated to the museum foundation when Kennecott closed down the copper pit.  It is amazing to me all the facilities that were required to run what is not a very big railroad in the steam era.  This first photo is of the passenger station which included the railroad headquarters on the second floor.  The second floor is maintained just as it was when it last operated.

This is just one of the upstairs rooms in the station building.  With the bay window, this room could have been used as a yard tower. 

Within the really large shop building, they let visitors wander throughout all long as you don't climb onto any of the equipment.  When I was there, repair or restoration work was happening on several pieces of equipment.

The yard area was also quite large with all the facilities a steam railroad would need.  There were also quite a few examples of freight cars parked in the yard.  Mostly box cars, open hoppers, and gondolas, all letters for the Nevada Northern.

While there I went for a train ride up Robinson Canyon to the site of the now closed copper pit that the railroad had served.  The train was pulled by a VO-1000 and had two heavyweight coaches, an open car and a caboose.  The caboose was not accessible to the passengers but we could wander the other three cars.  I spent most of the ride on the open car.

Michael was our conductor for this trip.  He is very knowledgeable about the history of this railroad and is also an Z scale modeler and we had some good conservation about modeling and the prototype.

I did a short YouTube video on my visit, here's the link to it: Visit to the Northern Nevada Railway Museum.  The Nevada Northern Railway is a bit out of the way but definitely worth a visit. They have things going on year round.   Here's a link to their website:  https://nnry.com/

Old box cars live on

When visiting the caboose motel that was featured a couple of posts ago, I noticed a pair of box cars that were sitting off to the side of the cluster of cabooses and other restored cars.  The first one was this Cotton Belt plug door type box car with road number SSW 23811.

The second car was this Golden West Services plug door box car.  

A zoom in of the above image shows this car had a road number of SSW 23587.  This had been a patch over the original Golden West Services road number.  By playing around with this image further in Photoshop I was able to determine the original road number was GSVR 768X22 with the X being either a 3 or a 9. 

In the weeds near the two box cars were 4 railcar trucks.  It can be assumed that these came from these two box cars.

On the Cotton Belt car I was able to find and photograph the placard indicating that the vintage of this car was 1974 making it 51 years old.

After returning home I got to wondering about the history of these particular box cars and did some researching on the internet.  I did find a few photos of the Golden West car on rrpicturearchives.net.  Those placed this car in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah between 2009 and 2015.  They didn't have any photos of the Cotton Belt car on that site but I found photos of both on Flicker.  Both photographed on the same day in 2018 and at the same location which was described as the Ironton scrap line which is in Provo, Utah.

So it appears that both of these box cars reached the end of their active railroad life in Provo, Utah and were purchased by someone and brought by truck to the site they are at now.  Glad they escaped the scrapper and hopefully they will restored and converted to a new use.

A morning in Carlin, Nevada in 1992

We are spending a morning in the spring of 1992 at the Southern Pacific Yard in Carlin, Nevada watching the action.  The first train in is a westbound Ogden to San Jose coal loads being pulled by an SD40 and a C44-9W, both painted in the speed lettering scheme.

Carlin is a crew change point for the Southern Pacific with east bound trains also taking on fuel here.  Turnouts have been aligned to give this train the path shown with a red line in the photo below.

No fuel is needed for this westbound going downgrade.   The new head end crew is walking out to their train as it reaches the west end of the yard.  On this layout we still have full crews and the new rear end crew has been taken down to the other end of the yard by one of the yard's motor vehicles.  This crew is based in Sparks and had brought an eastbound train here late yesterday and spent the night here at the railroad rooming house.  The crew getting off is based in Ogden and will spend the night here and take another train back to Ogden tomorrow.

About 20 minutes after the coal train left, another westbound freight entered the yard.  This one was an Ogden to Roseville manifest that will exchange a few cars here.  The power on this train is a GP35 in Kodachrome paint and a B23-7.  The yard's MP-15 switch engine has gotten into position to do the switching work.

The yard switcher is pulling the caboose and the last two covered hoppers from the rear of the train.  The SP covered hopper is an empty bound for the EP Minerals plant in Lovelock and the leased unit is a load of plastic pellets bound for the Diamond Plastics plant in Battle Mountain.

After setting the two covered hoppers out on the siding, the switcher picks up two empty tank cars from the storage track.  These two empty tank cars are bound for the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California.

The two empty tank cars and the caboose are then coupled to the rear of the train.

After the manifest train departs, the switcher grabs the empty D&RGW covered hopper that had been on the storage track with the tank cars and with it moves the two covered hoppers from the siding to the storage track.  The D&RGW car is a load from the Halliburton facility in Battle Mountain that will be picked on on the next West Colton bound train and placing it at the east end of the storage track will make that transfer easier.  The other two cars will go out on the next Lovelock local.

With it's work done for now, the yard crew parks the switcher on the siding and heads out for lunch.