Milwaukee Road in the 21st Century

JKD Jul 11, 2007

  1. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    I wish. But right now I don't even have the money for a ridiculous passport. :angry:
     
  2. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    Too bad. I guess I can just keep posting photos, instead. The only problem is, there are only a very few modules that I can use in the local Ntrak layouts that even remotely resemble Milwaukee locations. Nothing like the big bridges of St Paul Pass, but I do try.
     
  3. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    That's all there is! Can't ask for more. :)
     
  4. Burlington Northern Fan

    Burlington Northern Fan TrainBoard Supporter

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    How about black and orange safety stripes on the nose the cab eye brows in your colors. Shawn
     
  5. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    Not sure exactly what that means... It may need some punctuation.

    The painting was done for me by someone else, though, and safety are really tricky to mask and paint. I'm not sure I would want to do them on the nose, because it's not something the Milwaukee ever had and trying to keep up with modern themes, I can only think of a very few railroads that still use safety striping on the cab front or nose of their locos.

    I know BN experimented with black and orange nose stripping, so that might make them a little bit anti-Milwaukee because the BN wasn't exactly friendly towards the Milwaukee, and BNSF probably still wouldn't be today, if they were still around and running their own system.

    Also, like Boxcab mentioned before, the current BNSF paint scheme looks so similar to the Milwaukee's colours, it would be hard to tell the two railroads apart, now, so I'd prefer to find ways to make it look different from BNSF and still try to keep the basic orange and black motif.
     
  6. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    Okay, back in fantasy land:

    Here's some Milwaukee Road high horsepower. A Milwaukee Road SD90MAc leads a train a modern tank cars into the tunnel at Nimrod MT, swinging away from the parallel Montana Rail Link trackage.

    [​IMG]
     
    Kurt Moose likes this.
  7. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    Can't think of what that leaser unit owner is....?
     
  8. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    It's CEFX: whoever those reporting marks belong to, but I have been thinking of adding Milwaukee Road heralds to the sides, like the Paducah & Louisville did with the SD90Mac lease units they had.
     
  9. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    CEFX is CIT Group ( Capital Finance, Inc.) Go ahead and add heralds. It's your empire, and you are The Boss. :)
     
  10. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    Well, I'm trying to remain in the realm of plausibility here, notwithstanding the double-ended F7. But it seems like just about anything goes in the real world these days, anyway, so it should be okay. I just know there is a prototype reference for it because PAL has already done it, so I can to :teeth:.
     
  11. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    BTW- How was that October train show? Any pictures?
     
  12. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    This one was from the October show: for the amount of time I was actually able to get things to stay on the rails. Nothing wanted to actually stay on the rails, so I guess it really was the Milwaukee Road :uhoh:.

     
  13. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    No new fantasy pictures this time, but I just ran across something that is relevant to the Milwaukee Road in the 21st century.

    I do a lot of surveying the old right of way using aerial photos and maps to see where things are today and how it might affect the railway if it was still there. Today, I just found out about a bridge in Renton, Wa, across the Cedar River, right at the end of the street running portion of the Milwaukee's mainline through Renton. It seems that in 2008, the bridge had to be replaced "to accommodate fuselage shipments traveling to and from Boeing's Renton facility". Apparently they come all the way from Wichita.

    http://www.clarkconstruction.com/our-work/projects/bnsf-cedar-river-bridge-replacement

    I found this really interesting. Even though the line is owned by BNSF, today, it's fun to think how there could have been trains of airplane fuselages running through Renton behind orange and black locomotives, that would not be lettered for BNSF. Maybe, on an even more far fetched notion, it might have even been possible for interchange trains of fuselages coming up over Snoqualmie Pass into Renton. I guess I might have to find some way to model that, now, with my nice orange and black SD90Mac.
     
  14. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    That's part of the line change which was made when I-405 was built, and the old NP (Lake Washington) Belt Line through town was eliminated. As BNSF has abandoned the line north of Renton, they had to make this upgrade. Previously fuselages had come in from up north, down along the Lake. Now they irritate the locals by crawling up the street through town.

    After the BN merger, MILW trains to Bellingham used that route. A few blocks north of this site is where the street to PC&F was crossed. I got stuck there more than a few times, and was made late to work... If BN was switching that plant, it could really back up traffic.

    Many years beforehand, the r-o-w where that bridge stands had been used by the Pacific Coast RR, when they had a line running up north to a coal mine. The MILW signal maintainer had to keep some of the equipment on a short segmant of that track. I should have asked him more about how that came to be. Possibly part of the BN merger/MILW trackage rights requisites.
     
  15. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    I didn't know there was a PC&F plant there, as well. I do like the idea of having the Milwaukee Road move airplanes, though. Imagine them going up through the Cascades, maybe even behind an electric motive power consist :rolleyes:. And if they did move over the Milwaukee Line, then they could have built a new junction just where that bridge crosses the Cedar River, and avoid the street running section. I like the street running, though, but it would have been just as fun to see plane bodies flying through all those backyards on the line through Maple Valley. I get the impression, thought, that the I405 bridge over the Cedar River was not there when the Milwaukee Road was still running, because it looks like it would have no clearance for modern trains.
     
  16. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    Yes. That was THE PC&F site. They also had other PACCAR subsidiary operations there. CARCo winches, Kenworth stuff, military armor rebuilding contracts and I don't recall what else right now.

    Somewhere I have a track schematic which shows there actually was such a junction there, as you describe, when PCRR operated that coal branch line. This was decades before the NP -re-route you see today, which created "Renton Junction". MILW would have been capable of hauling fuselages, if any such business had come their way. So you certainly can simulate that scenario.
     
  17. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    Well, apparently, they can fit through a tunnel because there's a video of a train of Boeing bodies coming out of the Cascade tunnel, so they could have easily fit into Snoqualmie tunnel and St. Paul Pass tunnel. I know some of the books belabor the point that the Milwaukee had numerous 10 degree curves

    I'm not so sure about the tunnel at the summit of the Saddle Range. In any case, though, as someone else I talked to pointed out: with the Milwaukee Road's type of luck, Boeing probably would have moved production to Mexico, instead.

    [video=youtube_share;ErnScsC2lyw]http://youtu.be/ErnScsC2lyw[/video]

    Just need to change the paint scheme on those engines, and this could be the west portal of Snoqualmie Tunnel.




     
  18. PGE-N°2

    PGE-N°2 TrainBoard Member

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    Not necessarily relevant to the 21st century, although it could be if this were actually real, but in my ongoing attempts to find fantasy modern electric locos, I keep toying with the idea of getting some U50B's in N scale: the big double engined locos that GE made, pop some pantographs on them, paint them orange and black, listing them as electric locos.

    Big and boxy, with that giant cab at one end, they actually would look close to the Milwaukee's passenger boxcabs that had the rounded fronts on them. They could be the perfect succesors to the long-lived boxcabs, and they were even built by GE! It seems entirely within the realm of plausibility that those large carbodies could easily have held electrical equipment instead of the two diesel engines they actually had, and they could have made some truly monstrous electrics, that might still be in operation today.
     
  19. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    What would you use for pantographs? The MILW type were so distinctive with their added bows.

    Those motors you suggest might have been, if MILW management had not been so mentally twisted. Remember that GE had offered (1970) to completely rebuild the electrification, including finishing "The Gap".

    Going back to your previous post: I doubt curves would have been any problem. Any freight cars in use 1980 and earlier were seen on the MILW, almost any day of the week. The tunnels had all been rebuilt years earlier and could clear any cars in use as well.
     
  20. HemiAdda2d

    HemiAdda2d Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    Love the photos! The SD90 looks great in MILW colors. One thing that comes to mind for 737s going over Snoqualmie Pass: the MILW had icebreakers installed on several SD40-2s to clear tunnel ice on trains with autoracks. That might be a cool addition to a modern unit (either extended or collapsed). Remember, Snoqualmie Pass was able to handle autoracks, while NP's Stampede Pass was not. It's perfectly plausible for Boeing traffic to take MILW rather than BN/BNSF, fantasy or not.
     
    Kurt Moose likes this.

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