10-12-08 On The Road, Part Two

It is a Pooh Bear kind of day on the Nebraska Prairies. Windy. Blustery. You name it, the day will have it. My brother Jay lived in Rochester, NY while going to the U of R back in the ‘80s and he said it was so windy some days that the wind would suck…backwards. It just might do it here today. The National Weather Service issued a high wind advisory. Gusts up to and beyond 40 MPH. Out here, there is nothing to stop it. With all of the flatness of the prairies, you get the wind at full force.

And talk about full force. I was traveling west on U.S. 30, the Lincoln Highway, between Columbus and Silver Creek and the speed limit was 60 and it was raining. Approaching me in the other lane is a tractor-trailer truck doing the same speed. But to the right of his rig, you see this very thick and one-lane-wide ball of rain. And I mean a BIG BALL, as high as the truck. We pass each other at a combined 120 MPH and my car has instantly become fully washed. As long as the car didn’t change lanes on its own, I’m OK.
People keep asking me about my fascination with trains, particularly out here in Nebraska. Well, here is one on them. The snapshots below come from just due west of Silver Creek.
What you are looking at is a unit coal train, all 135 cars. The markings on the hopper cars are CWEX, which belong to a power plant near Chicago, IL. Half of the trains that run on the Union Pacific where I am traveling are coal trains. Half of them are loads going east to fuel electric power plants; the other half are empties going west to reload at the Powder River Coal Basin in Wyoming. The lead unit, number 8181, is a 4400 horsepower GM locomotive. The trailing unit on the head end and the locomotive on the tail end of the train provide a combined 13,200 horsepower. Each hopper car, better known as a "coalporter gondola car", carries 121.45 tons of coal and is 53 feet in length. Do the math and you wind up with 16,395.75 tons of coal with a combined consist weight of 19,305 tons and about 7200 feet in length. Quite impressive if you ask me. And if you were to take all of that coal and move it via tractor-trailer trucks, at 24 tons in each trailer and a 500 horsepower semi-tractor, it would take approximately 683 tractor-trailer trucks to move all of that coal with a combined horsepower rating of 341,500. Rail is by far a very efficient means to move goods. There are other unit trains that abound on the UP but more about them in the days to come.

At about 1pm CDT, I arrived in Gibbon, NE, about 13 miles east from the city of Kearney. This spot on the railroad is known as Gibbon Junction, a Mixmaster if you will. The double mainline Council Bluffs Subdivision from Omaha meets up with the double mainline Marysville Subdivision from Kansas City, MO. From here it is a triple track mainline running 111 miles west to North Platte, NE. But that is only part of the story.
Let’s make that Tease 1 of tomorrow’s installment.

And the winds from earlier?? It has been quite blustery this afternoon. Still no thunderstorms sighted and the rain is intermittent. If there is at least one benefit to living out here in this part of Tornado Alley, you have good visual assistance. Where I am located, you literally have horizon-to-horizon skies. Such as it is today, the overcast gray color is not very appealing. But on a sunny, clear day, the Sky Blue skies will bring a tear to your eyes. The word “amazing” doesn’t even begin to describe what you see. Having grown up and lived in suburbia all of my life, out here on the prairies, you are taken aback. It is just truly amazing.

Anyway, I find myself in Kearney at 3pm watching the trains roll by. And the rain and thunderstorms mentioned earlier?? (In the little girl’s voice from that particular movie) “They're here”. And what about Kearney?? Let’s make that Tease 2.

I’m Philip J Zocco. On The Road. In Kearney, Nebraska.