I don't even want to imagine what the phrase Bachelor Party Road Trip may mean to most other young men, but for a railfan it means putting as many miles behind you as possible and bagging as many train photos as possible before the realities of marriage, family and career crush your full railfan aspirations forever.
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| Magma Arizona Baldwins - the Real Purpose for My Trip |
School was letting out in
mid-April, 1990 and Nici and I were planning to marry the following July. I’d been talking with James Bradley, who was now living in
Phoenix and managing a sub shop for William, our old boss. James had invited me down to stay with him
for a week, and when I found out that Stan, one of my apartment mates, was also
driving down to Phoenix when school let out, the plan came together. There was a girl in our ward from Flagstaff, and the three of us
agreed to caravan down that far with her, have dinner with her family, and then
Stan and I would continue down to Phoenix.
I rode down with Stan as far as Panguitch or Kanab, and then I switched
over to ride with the girl. One thing I
remember from that part of the trip was laughing when Stan got a speeding ticket
just after crossing into Arizona at Page.
As planned, we had dinner with her family in Flagstaff, and then Stan
and I headed south and he dropped me off at James’ apartment.
I don’t remember in exactly what
order things happened. There were some
limitations on our activities in that James still had to be at the sub shop
much of the time. A couple times I was
able to take his car and look around Phoenix a little, including checking out a
couple hobby shops. I remember there being
Circle Ks on nearly every corner, it seemed.
James had a girlfriend, and she spent some time with us. One time we went out to a dance club
with her, and afterward she and James got into an argument about something. He was really PO’d about it after she left, so I suggested that maybe this was a good time to get out of town and go
chase some trains. Phoenix is a lot like
Boise in that the freight mainline (SP, in the case of Phoenix) bypasses the
city several miles to the south, with a secondary passenger line looping up
into the city. We did watch Amtrak run
on that line once in the dark (with two GE P-30CH’s – the usual power for the
Sunset Limited at the time), but for mainline freight action, we would need to
go down to the small town of Maricopa.
One problem was that the radiator
in James’ Chevette was leaking pretty badly, and he had to keep topping it off
when he drove. We went to the sub shop
and filled an empty 5-gallon salad oil container with water, and after topping off the radiator, we headed
south. About half way to Maricopa (16
total miles away), the engine started to overheat and we used half of our water
jug to re-fill it. Of course, by the
time we got to Maricopa, we had lost all that water and would not be able to go
any farther without water. It was too late to get any that night, so we parked in a lot alongside the tracks, and
crashed in the back of his car where we had placed a thin mattress for that
purpose before we left Phoenix.
The next morning, we woke up
knowing we had to figure out how to get out of town. Fortunately, there was a small repair
shop just opening up down the highway.
We drove in there, explained our predicament to the guy, and he was all
over getting us taken care of. He pulled
the radiator right there and proceeded to locate and solder the leak. I walked over to the small convenience store
and bought a box of doughnuts, a quart of milk, and a bottle of Pepsi for my
breakfast. Good thing I had the Pepsi,
because I needed it to rinse out my mouth when the milk turned out to be
sour! By the time I had the sour milk
taste out of my mouth, the radiator was back in the car and we were ready to
go. Best part – they guy only charged
James $10 for the fix! Don’t know if he
ever did, but James promised himself he would always take his car down to this
guy for any future repairs.
Anyway, now that the car was
drivable, we decided to continue south and try to visit Mexico. We got on the freeway, turned south at Tucson
and were soon in Nogales, AZ, and then across the border to Nogales, Mexico. It was funny how obvious the differences were
in the look of the two neighboring cities.
We drove through town, found the railroad station and engine servicing
facility. We took photos of a few
odd-ball locomotives (I’m still not sure exactly what they were – probably home-shop
rebuilds with EMD and Alco parts intermixed).
We tried to continue south to a rail junction we saw on the map named
Benjamin Hill, but it was too much of a hassle to figure out the auto
insurance we would need to buy, so we just looked around Nogales a little
before crossing the border again.
At the check-in station on the US
side of the border, we ran into a little trouble. The Border Patrol agent wasn’t much older
than we were, and the exchange went something like this:
“Are you both US
citizens?”
“Yes.”
“How long were
you in Mexico?”
“About an hour.”
“Did you buy
anything?”
“No.”
“What was the
purpose of your trip?”
“Watching
trains.”
Pause . . .
“Pull over
there!”
It seems that two guys in their early
twenties driving all the way down to Nogales just to watch trains for an hour
didn’t quite fit into his idea of normal behavior. Of course, the mattress and blankets in the
back of the car would’ve made a great hiding place for whatever contraband we
could be smuggling across the border, so I really don’t blame the guy for flagging
us for further inspection. The more
experienced agent that searched the car and questioned us more in depth could
easily see that we were what we said we were.
He accepted our story about watching trains, and the presence of some
copies of Trains and Model Railroader that we also had in the car reinforced
our explanation. He did look through our
things, checked under the mattress, and peeked in a couple of the obvious
hiding locations in the body of the car.
Then he wished us luck, waved us through, and got on with the business
of busting real smugglers.
On the way back, between Tucson
and Phoenix, we saw several trains on the SP mainline, and we even made a cab
visit with a crew who was waiting in the siding.
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| Mainline Power on the SP Between Tucson and Maricopa |
Another important side-trip we
made, and the real purpose for my trip to Arizona, was to go up toward Superior
to see if we could witness the Magma Arizona Railroad operating any of their
Baldwin diesels. We went up there one
day in the middle of the week. We drove
up all the way to Superior first, and went into the office at the
copper mine. James tried to bluff his
way into the shop for pictures, and that attempt failed, but they were
helpful enough to let us know the train had headed downhill earlier and
could still be down at Magma Junction, their connection with the SP.
We scurried back down there, and
somehow found the right road to get to the junction. I was hoping to see their big six-axle road
switcher (DRS-6-6-1500 number 10), but instead the train had their two S-8
switchers (numbers 8 and 9), MU’ed in “elephant style”. They did some switching to put their train
together, and then they headed back up the hill to Superior. We photographed them at several locations,
and followed the dirt road that paralleled the tracks up a desert canyon on
their approach to Superior. I wish I’d
had a video camera to record the spectacle, because the engines had been “shotgunned” (or whatever they called it),
with one exhaust stack for each cylinder, and as they ran, you could see
individual puffs of exhaust over the stacks as each cylinder fired in its
correct order. The sound was pretty good
too. We took lots of photos, and most of
mine turned out as well as could be expected.
Although I was disappointed at not seeing the DRS running that day, in
retrospect, watching two Baldwin switchers working in tandem like that was
probably an even more rare experience.
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| Dodging Cactus and Cattle |
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| Making a Run for the Superstitions |
At the end of the week, and per
our original plan, James and I left Phoenix in his car and drove up through Kingman,
Hoover Dam, and Las Vegas to get to Provo.
We stopped at Kingman to photograph a Santa Fe GP-20/GP-30 power set in
the yard, and to watch an ATSF train climb eastbound up through the canyon west
of there. At Henderson, NV, we passed
Railroad Pass Casino, which we took as a positive omen. However, we ended up losing several dollars
at the blackjack table. Finally, early
the next morning, we pulled into Provo.
I bought James one last tank of gas, and he dropped me at my apartment
where my car was waiting, before he took off.
One problem with my trip to
Phoenix was that I financed the whole thing on my new Discover credit card. It had a $1000 limit, and I hadn’t kept very
close track of my finances. At one
point, I even loaned James som cash, because he
couldn’t afford to drive me up to Provo. My first order of business
before leaving Provo was to withdraw some more cash against my card to pay for
gas and food. Guess what…the card was
now maxed out and I couldn’t get any cash!!
Knowing I may be stranded without some gas money, I headed up to the BYU
Bookstore to commit a crime. Sort
of. The bookstore had a policy of
cashing students’ checks up to a $75 maximum.
I knew my Zion’s Bank checking account was empty, but I went ahead and
cashed a check against that account, hoping I’d find some way to cover it later
before the check cleared. This was on a
Friday, so I knew that would give me time.
Fortunately, this was in the day when you could still drive from Provo
to Spokane in a ’72 Galaxie for less than $75.
Good luck doing that today! Even
then, I probably didn’t have much left for food, but I don’t remember what I
did to avoid starvation on my trip.
On my way north through Utah, I
took a side trip out to the Golden Spike Monument at Promontory (my first time –
I’ve been back at least twice since then), but otherwise the trip to Nampa was
uneventful and I found Shad Roe’s house without any real trouble. Shad was a former missionary companion, and
he was also in the process of courting a Danish girl he’d met on his
mission. (They ended up getting married, too –
I visited them in ’93 while they lived near Aarhus – and then they divorced. But that came a lot later.) Shad and I stayed up and chatted for a while
before I went to sleep. When I woke up
there the next day, Shad had already left for work. But, his mom fed me breakfast and saw me on
my way.
From there, I drove north toward
Horseshoe Bend and continued along the Payette and Salmon River canyons, up
over White Bird Pass, across the Camas Prairie, down to the Clearwater at
Lapwai, then back up the Potlatch River to Kendrick, over to Moscow, and then
across the Palouse to Spokane. Being a
Saturday, I didn’t see any trains running this day, but I did observe the route
of the UP branch to Cascade, and speculated how that line could have connected
to the Camas Prairie RR to form a direct Spokane to Boise rail link. I don’t think it could really have worked,
but it was fun to think about. Also, driving
from Lewiston to Moscow through Juliaetta and Kendrick let me see the embargoed
P&L line before it was pulled up. At
Colfax, I managed to photograph a pair of UP (ex-WP) locomotives idling with a former MoPac
caboose. Although it was possible the crew was eating lunch somewhere and that if I waited longer, they may have returned to complete their run to Spokane. But it had already been a long, eventful
day, and I was ready to go home and get some rest!
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| UP in Colfax |
The next morning, I had to explain
to Mom and Dad my financial predicament.
They advanced me $75, and on Monday, I drove over to Coeur d’Alene to
the nearest branch of Zion’s Bank to see if I could cover my “bad” check. Although the teller there couldn’t place the
funds into my account directly (we still hadn’t figured out true interstate
banking by then), she did forward them to ZB in Utah right away, and somehow
flagged my account to let it know the funds were on the way. Either way, it must have worked, because I
never heard any more about it.
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