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."
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