1946 Plan To Rehab The Connell Northern And Adrian Cutoff

Courtesy of the MHS.

February 14, 1946

1913 GN-NP Joint Use Of Facilities At Adrian

Courtesy of the MHS.

June 11, 1913

Cab Hop

Courtesy of Tom Carver.

October 1980.

"Rolling cab hop through Spokane's industrialized east end, the Coulee City Turn has departed its home base of Parkwater to head west. It's still harvest season in central Washington State, and the seven units will be making two pickups to fill out the train with empties for the elevators, pick up loads on the return trip the next day, or as necessary on the westward trip to clear elevator tracks for more empties."

 

CW Eleanor Turn-Again

Photo courtesy of Blair Kooistra.

Blair says:

"On a beautiful late Indian summer evening, September 16, 1981, a single GP9 is sufficient to forward a dozen empty 40' grain box cars down the Eleanor Spur, a downgraded Northern Pacific branchline which wandered for 18 miles south and east from a connection with Burlington Northern's 8th subdivision branch between Cheney and Coulee City in search of a handful of small-capacity grain elevators in eastern Washington state..

"Operated only during the wheat rush in the late summer and into fall, the westbound CW local would stop and pick up the necessary number of ordered boxcars from the siding at Major, 5 miles east of Davenport, and then, arriving at the junction, cut off the trailing locomotive and the boxcars and make a slow, slow trip spotting cars.

"The line dead-ended at a small elevator at Eleanor. On this evening, the train Mike Sawyer and I followed went as far as Gravelles, 11.1 miles south of Davenport. The elevator track had a capacity of but four cars, and several more than that were loaded and ready to go, shoved out fouling the main track, requiring several saw-by moves to spot the empties and pick up the loads.

"Mike and I left the local to its thing as the sun set. In retrospect, of course, it would have been nice to do some blue hour and night exposures of this little-photographed operation.

"The spur was abandoned at the end of April in 1983. Its light rail restricted equipment to 50 ton capacity boxcars for its one commodity, wheat, in an era where the 40' boxcar was obsolete. In the post Staggers regulatory environment, BN accelerated its program of selling off and abandoning marginal lines, and the Eleanor spur certainly fit this description. Farmers along the Eleanor spur protested of course, but other elevators existed along the CW branch at Davenport, of course, or Reardan (only 5 miles from the end of the spur at Eleanor), or even along the GN mainline a dozen or so miles away to the south.

"For awhile, there were rumors Washington Public Power would build a new coal-fired power plant adjacent to the line, saving it from oblivion, but this never happened.

"The elevators are still in place out there in the wheat fields, but it's been over 40 years since a train rocked and rolled down the old jointed rail to deliver boxcars to elevators."

Power That Endures

Guest post by Frederick Simon.

“Power That Endures | A Reflection on the EMD SD40-2 and SD40T-2”

There’s something about that badge—the worn “GM Power” plate, its sky-blue enamel fading, its rusted rivets etched with the quiet resolve of decades of honest work. It’s a relic, but it’s more than that. It’s a signature, a promise from another time. A promise of power that endures.

I miss the days sitting in those spartan, squeaky seats of the EMD SD40-2s on the Washington Eastern Railroad, left hand resting on the automatic brake handle, the other working the throttle. Out there, in Eastern Washington, where the wind bites like a saw blade and the wheat fields ripple like a green ocean in spring, those old beasts were my constant—as they were for every other hoghead that worked the “CW” line. The SD40-2 wasn’t just another locomotive—it was a workhorse. 3,000 horsepower that came from that near-indestructible turbocharged, two-cycle, 16-645E3B coupled to an AR10, feeding those horses to six D77s. And that unmistakable sound. You know it. You’ve heard it. Right? There are no words sufficient to give that sound its due. Not to mention the equally distinctive silhouette—those “porches” on either end big enough for the crew to set up some lawn chairs and a barbecue to cook up some Grade-A meat just right. And we did. I can still smell the diesel exhaust mingled with the Kingsford charcoal, a delightfully commingled aroma for any train buff railroader. Wink-wink. It didn’t get any better than that.

But I digress.

Fact is, they were “SDs” in the truest sense of that proprietary nomenclature—“Special Duty”—though they would wander off onto GP territory branch lines and heavy yard switching duties more and more as newer iterations arrived from EMD. Until today, some 50 years later, a few still hold on at Class Ones, where their ranks—once in the thousands—have been decimated by progress, emissions regulations, and just plain old age. Those that have managed to survive “planned obsolescence”—an ironically General Motors suits buzzword—have found new homes on regionals and shortlines, though even there they are losing ground—and fast. The trio of ex-UP (one née-MoPac) I teamstered at the WER are long gone. History. Replaced by more fuel-efficient, more powerful, and climate-friendly GE Dash-8s.

But before I get ahead of myself, I also have to make mention of that equally indubitable SD40 iteration. Back eight-some-odd years ago, while working the Scoot Trains on the Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad (later the WER), I had the rare privilege of working with a lone SD40T-2—an outsider, one of only five Cotton Belt remote snoots at that, a ‘tunnel motor’ built for climbing the Sierras and Rockies, yet plying the rolling, wind-scoured plains of Eastern Washington. The low-slung air intakes, designed to gulp cooler air as they crawled up unforgiving grades in the long tunnels with hot black exhaust accumulating and no place to vent, seemed out of place in the open sky, but that machine didn’t care. She just worked. Stubborn. Reliable. She remembered her purpose—all 418,000 pounds of her. Weight that didn’t show on her physique but when it came time to pull, well, that’s when you knew her extra pounds would hold traction and march your ass right up Deep Creek, no questions asked.

The SD40-2s on WER were no different. Built for a world of steel, strain, and grain, they took to the rails like old prizefighters—bruised but unbeaten, shaken but not stirred. I ran them through snow that buried the right-of-way right up to the cab window, coaxed them over grades where they dug in like the stubborn mules they were, each throttle notch like flipping the bird in the face of gravity. I learned to trust their temper, their myriad acquired ailments, their idiosyncrasies, and, most of all, their predictable surge of power when I opened the throttle. Even on bad rail, they were steady thanks to their HTC trucks. And when you’ve spent enough hours in the cab, feeling the rhythm of low-joint jointed rail beneath you, you begin to know your locomotive—not just in its specifications, but in its soul—all of its steadfast 3,000 horsepower and nearly 90,000 pounds of tractive effort.

But it isn’t just the numbers. It’s that old “GM Power” badge—the one in the photo—on the control stand, faded but defiant. A reminder of a time when locomotives were built to last, not just to meet a budget or break budgets as today’s new locomotives do. A reminder of those days on the WER, of the lone tunnel motor—and a pair of kin SD45s—on the Eastern Washington Gateway, of the quiet certainty that came with putting your trust in electro-mechanical harmony incarnate that never lied.

I miss those machines. I miss their blunt honesty, their pulsing, turbo-whine-growl in the crisp morning air, the way they seemed to shrug off time itself. And when I look at that badge, I remember—I remember what it meant to be part of something that endured. It wasn’t just a brand. It was a promise. 

August 1981 CW Local Chase

Courtesy of Tom Carver.

August 15, 1981

The local had started the day at Almira, where the crew had outlawed the night before. Here are pictures that Tom has shared of that trip.

The Central Washington Local drops empties at Hanson, WA, on its westbound trip to Coulee City; will pick up loads on the return.

In a location where one would not expect to find three F-units and a Geep, the CW local's crew is turning the power for the return to Spokane from Coulee City. 

 At Coulee City, making up their train.

 

After outlawing the night before at Almira, WA, the engineer has the hammer down on his F-Units and a Geep, just after leaving Coulee City on the return trip east to Spokane with the CW Local. The gray dust trail is volcanic ash from the Mt. St. Helens eruption the year before.

Back at Hanson.

 It is about to pass under U.S. Route 2 in the scrublands near Govan.

The eastbound Coulee City Turn did not stop for any pickups in Almira, WA, on this trip back to Spokane. 

At Mondovi.

The CW Local has left the open prairie and wheat fields of central Washington State behind and is entering the far eastern part of the state which gradually becomes more forested, as seen here between Creston and Davenport. August 15, 1981.

"The engineer and agent are having a friendly chat while the CW Local waits at Cheney, Wash., for clearance to enter the main line from the CW Branch and proceed to Spokane. Three F-Units and a Geep are the power on a pleasant August 15, 1981."

CW Trainorders-3

 

CW Trainorders-2

 

CW Trainorders-1

 

WER Blair Style

Courtesy of Blair Kooistra.

September 2020

Blair says:

"World-traveler Steven J. Brown and I made the most of today, rambling the countryside west and south of Spokane for a bit of branchline and shortline variety-and had a blast doing so.

"Our intelligence said "be at Reardan for sunrise," and there we were, and almost to the minute, the eastbound Eastern Washington Railroad scoot train headed to Four Lakes arrived as the sun peaked over the horizon. Two SD40-2's on a full train had engineer Ted Curphey peg the throttles to the 8th notch on the climb out of Reardan, winding between the hills in the amazing light of dawn. At Hite, a GP30 was added for additional grunt climbing out of Deep Creek. The morning was still, the light sublime. . .I really love eastern Washington at dawn..."

 

BN 808 Near Almira

Guest post by Blair Kooistra.

Occasionally, the trap door will open and gravity pulls me into the big bin of slides hearkening back to the earliest days of railroading. . .at least my life of railroading.

It's the fall of 1980, and Burlington Northern is moving grain to market off the branchlines in Eastern Washington.  The network of light rail, minimal ballast, and small grain elevators has been steadily reduced through abandonment; certainly the opening of the Snake River for grain barge traffic hasn't helped the plight of the railroad.

But business still thrives during harvest season on the 108.8 mile former Northern Pacific branchline from Cheney to Coulee City--the railroad calls it the 8th Subdivision of the Spokane Division, but the railroaders colloquially call it the "CW Branch".

A small band of happy warriors with cameras have been chasing the local all day, hitting the road in the very small hours of the day on the hope of intercepting it somewhere on its westward journey to Coulee City. Eyes peeled in the dark, we visited each little grain elevator town, looking for the train--not at Coulee City--so we pressed east, finally finding it at Almira. Before too long, the crew arrived in a van provided by the motel in Coulee City which held the railroad's lodging and transportation contract.  Before dawn, they were on their way back west.

The attraction to us, moreso than the nature of branchline railroading, was the use of streamlined EMD F-unit power on this train. The F's had been bumped earlier in the year from the usual assignment at their Spokane mechanical base on the Marias Pass helpers, so they trickled down to branchline service, usually on the CW job as well as the "Highball" from Spokane to Pullman and Lewiston.

After spotting empty 40' boxcars at Coulee City and pulling the loads, they were back eastbound towards home. Starting with 15 loads, 16 more were grabbed at Hartline. . By the time the train rattled up Corbett Draw east of Almira, 31 cars were in tow, wearing a delightful mix of paint schemes, current and obsolete: BN, Burlington, Great Northern--curiously, no Northern Pacific cars with the giant NP initials and monad logo. 

Looking back at this from 46 years in the future, I realize now how perfect my timing was to get there when I did. The 40 foot boxcar as a vehicle for wheat haulage had just a few years left before total replacement by 100-ton covered hoppers. Those F-units--and geeps--on the head end--were living on borrowed time as well. Less than two years later, the F-units were stricken from the roster. Some of the geeps lingered on another 15 or so years. 

What a wonderful time in railroading this still was--streamlined diesels, boxcar grain with friction-bearing trucks, and a light-railed branchine with minimal ballast. The rail joints banged and clattered as the train passed by. And of course there was a caboose on the rear. An every day scene back then. How everyday? I didn't even photograph the caboose!

Meet At Adrian

My photo. 

June 29, 2026

A westbound Z train is doing track speed at Adrian, WA, while passing an empty oil train holding the siding. 

My photo location is part of the filled in Northern Pacific trestle which leapt over the GN main and Crab Creek here. This structure was removed in 1983. There was an actual interchange track here, starting at a point along the oil train marked by the water tank in the distance. There was another bridge over Crab Creek there, and a ramp going up to the NP at a point called Adco. Adco was a conjunction of the names “Adrian” and “Connell.” The line to here had been built between those points in 1910, connecting with the 1903 build NP branch down from Coulee City. 

At one time, this junction had been envisioned to allow the large quantities of wheat coming off the NP, which wanted to go to tidewater at Seattle, from having to be hauled all the way back to Spokane, and then to Seattle. This would save about 200 miles. 

During the mid 1930s, this interchange boomed with carloads of construction material for the abuilding Grand Coulee Dam. While much was handed over to the NP at Spokane, the cement plant along the GN at Grotto, on the west side of Stevens Pass, added it’s share to the other 5 places enlisted to provide product.

In the early days of the newly merged Burlington Northern, there had been a plan floated to build a unit train loader in this area. Unfortunately, the boom of Wyoming coal took the bulk of BN’s money and time, so this project never came to fruition. 

The interchange had a longer life than expected. While the line through to Coulee City was largely unused after 1950, the interchange and line south boomed due to the sugar beet processor built outside of Moses Lake. Nearby Quincy and Winchester, along the GN, became huge beet growing regions. Beets from there were shipped by rail along the GN to Adrian, where they were handed off to the NP for furtherance south to the plant. This continued until the plant was closed in 1979. 

Both bridges were removed in 1983 after BN got permission to abandon the line south. 

All For Townsites

From the "Spokesman Review."

February 15, 1896

Lotta Moist

My photo.

June 22, 2026

A pair of Aeroflite CL-415s were assigned to fight the Garred Road fire, west of Coulee City, WA on 6-21 and 22, 2026. There is speculation of how the fire started, likely a broken wire in the powerline from the Chelan Falls powerplant to the Banks Lake powerplant. 

The CL-415 is a derivative of the piston engine CL-215 which has been in service since 1970. The aircraft is purpose built and designed specifically for aerial firefighting and is capable of delivering around 1600 gallons of water to a wildfire in a short period of time. It’s equipped with Pratt and Whitney PW123 turboprop engines.

The plane is flying in the transition area between the upper and lower Grand Coulees, marked by the Dry Falls cataracts, part of which can be seen in the view. 

Dry Falls is around 400 feet from top to bottom, with some cliffs on the west side being another 800 feet taller. My view is part way up that 800 foot side. The top of the falls blends into a scoured plateau at least a mile and a half wide, with noticeable pits and eroded areas from the large flows of water here. 

Tourism took off at Dry Falls in 1928 with the building of the Vista House and opening of Dry Falls State Park. Things haven’t changed that much since then, though the road to the site is now paved, and a more modern interpretive center was built nearby. One feature early guests noted was the “Great Sphinx” the “island” of basalt that never fully eroded during the floods. This is the layered chunk of basalt in the center-right of the image. 

To do my best to make this a railroad photo, at the very upper edge of the burned section, lower right of the image, is the grade of the Central Washington Railroad. This was a subsidiary of the Northern Pacific, which was banned by charter from building branch lines. This was easily sidestepped by incorporating companies, fully controlled by the NP and it’s officers, to build lines everywhere. 

The “CW” built to Coulee City in 1891, but graded a further 10 miles out of town, including through this image. Here is my photo location.

If you peek at the map link, you might be saying “Dan, I see 2 grades below your spot.” You would be correct. The CW was NOT the first railroad here. That would have been the Seattle, Lake Shore, & Eastern. 

The SLS&E was an upstart line based on the west side of the state that built a few important lines there in the 1880s, including a connection to Canada at Sumas, WA. The promoters would have preferred to just have a bunch of money put into their pockets, but figured bilking a cheaply made line by overcharging for it’s building, via the construction company would do okay too. They could then look for a real railroad building west at that time and hopefully unload the whole thing for another tidy sum. The then building west Great Northern looked promising.

This part of then Washington territory was part of the Northern Pacific land grant, and the NP was alarmed that the SLSE was building a line into this area. It then whipped up the Central Washington and sent it’s crews west from Spokane to firm up it’s grip, backed by the NP wallet.

The SLSE wheezed and gasped as it surveyed and then built it’s line from Spokane west. It didn’t quite make Davenport, about 30 miles from Spokane, before running out of money. Citizens of that fine burg were coerced to fund the cost to their town. The survey crew made it across the state, running the line to Coulee City, up the west wall of the Grand Coulee and then off to Waterville. Next stop was down to Wenatchee, the townsite of which was owned by the principal owners of the SLSE! Next was up over the Cascades via Cady Pass and then to a connection with the Sumas line in the greater Everett area. 

The grading crew were sent west to the harder parts to build, as money was already tight. Grading was started west of Coulee City and a careful look at the map will show their very incomplete grade sort of following the CW west of town, then it disappears for a bit. Another section reappears, following the CW, as that line headed south to gain elevation via a great loop, while the SLSE built inside of this loop, partially. This explains the second grade that can be seen below the one in the photo. More of the line can be seen further north of here, in bits and pieces. 

To finish this story, the SLSE went bankrupt, the GN being uninterested in any of their line, save for their bridge across the Spokane river at that town, while the GN built their own. The NP bought the SLSE, figuring this would be the best way to get control of the line, and being bankrupt, it was a bit cheaper this way. Not too many months later the NP realized they had been fleeced, as the property had to be fully rebuilt to NP standards, while one of the SLSE owners became western council for the GN at Seattle. 

Old Almira Trainorders-4

 

Old Almira Trainorders-3

 

Old Almira Trainorders-2