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McCloud River Railroad 1990.

Here is the winter of 1990 -91 and the January sunlight is screaming color. It is a cold day but no wind and no clouds and almost no snow. Up in this country in Northern California you can have snow like this in January one year and the next year there will be 20 FEET on the ground in the exact same spot. So we have an unusual train as this is a Saturday. The railroad didn t typically operate on weekends but it turns out the locomotive on the rear rolled a rail out from underneath itself the previous day at the Eastern end junction of the railroad with the Burlington Northern at Lookout. So this crew had to retrieve the rerailed locomotive and the bulk of the previous days train as well as the single locomotive that returned that previous day could not pull it. But it was a stroke of railfan luck for me. I arrived at McCloud around noon that day just expecting lunch and some videos in and around the rail yard. While everything was quiet there I saw several cars in front of the closed up shops parked. I noticed the #101 caboose was gone from it s usual spot. Then I looked through the shops window and I saw only one locomotive inside out of 4 total and nothing else to be seen. So off Eastward I sped listening to my scanner. After a couple of hours on logging roads I heard the crackling voice of the engineer releasing two blocks behind him. AHAA! A train somewhere in the Vicinity! GOTCHA on Video with that wonderful low full winter sunlight! And boy does that sun make the color of that orange caboose pop! That hopper car is empty heading for a load of Diatomaceous earth. Those first 7 boxcars are inbound paper loads form the East coast heading to the Sprint reload center in McCloud. Here the bulk paper was unloaded from boxcars into trucks for the last couple hundred miles to final delivery. This was a business creation of Bill Herndon a vice president of the Itel Corporation who owned the McCloud River Railroad. The mighty Union Pacific Railroad didn t like the McCloud having that business and dealt away that traffic from the McCloud transferring the traffic at Reno , Nevada through a deal that could only be called legal theft. This is a common inherent vulnerability of all short line railroads unfortunately. The water tank was at Bartle which was used in 1985 for the steam excursions they ran out there. Bartle is also the junction where the line split off and headed due South down to the town of Burney which was the source of most of the outbound freight traffic. This line also was and still is at the source of the Diatomaceous earth mine. Again this was a business idea that was put together by the railroad and marketed to a company called Dicalite corporation. Again the genius business work of Bill Herndon. This operation continues to this very day trucking it s product out to meet the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad. So what s better than a manned locomotive bringing up the rear of a train? A manned locomotive AND a manned caboose...that s what!