The Mrs. and I went for a roadtrip today towards Mount Rainier, (it was sunny and 60+ degrees!!), and drove up near Morton, Wa. The old Milwaukee Road line up there is all but abandoned, lot's of overgrowth and turning back to nature. Hard to believe back as late as the 70's, 80+ carloads of raw wood was coming outta' here to Tacoma to mills. Sad, the mills up here are still going strong, but it all is shipped by trucks now......
This is just north of Morton, looking north towards Mineral. The rails can barely be seen east of the Morton depot, heading east from there for maybe a 100 yards into the bushes.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it..... On a side note, how much of the intact ROW is privately owned now?
This may belong to the City of Tacoma. It is not abandoned, nor has it been officially even taken out of service. Date nails? Somewhere I have a bag full.....
As a Christmas gift, I received Kalmbach's Trains of the 1970s softcover book and in it is the article I mentioned in the above post. I read a portion of it this morning and learned again that the MILW Fs on this route had no dynamic brakes. The Tideflats Roundhouse Foreman said that they tried to change brake shoes once a night! A photo in the story shows six F's on the trestle, A-B-A + A-B-A. That's a lot of brake shoes. I've saved many Trains magazines from this era, but it's nice to have the most classic articles in one spot in this book. How can all of this have been 40+ years ago?!
There were only a few F units based at Tacoma. They usually did not stray far. Normally just grinding tonnage up and down the Hill at Tacoma. Occasionally running down toward Chehalis area, or grabbed for a dead freight on a weekend, when power short.
Yes. Especially when one might fail, really loading up the rest. Also, the "B" units were slugs. So, no sound. Still, you could hear them coming for quite some time, before they crawled into sight and on by.