Hand Drawn CW Map

Drawn by Robert Scott for a feature on the Eastern Washington Gateway he was working on at the time.

2019 Govan Derailment

Guest post by Rodney Aho.

"Five years ago a serious derailment occurred on the Washington Eastern Railroad just east of Govan, between Wilbur and Almira, about 70 miles west of Spokane. Seven loaded grain cars left the tracks, six of which were damaged beyond repair; hundreds of feet of track were ripped up. Thankfully there were no injuries. (I was not the engineer.)
 

"The cause of the accident was initially believed to be a broken rail. Our maintenance crew immediately began the arduous task of pulling the wreckage off the right of way and rebuilding the track so service could be restored.
 

"It was shocking to see how much damage occurred, even though the track speed limit at that location was just 10 mph. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if the kinetic energy of the train’s 27 cars was concentrated and released at that one spot, it would equal six tons of TNT.
The potential for accidents always lurked in the back of our minds; consequently we took great care to work safely and always adhere to the operating rules."

1983 BN Washington Grain Elevator Directory E-M

Courtesy of Aaron Schwarz and the PNRA.

1971 BN Consolidated Annual Station Earnings

Courtesy of Aaron Schwarz and the PNRA.

Will Erect 100,000 Bu Elevator Here

From the Coulee City "Dispatch."

March 28, 1940

July 30, 1942

NP AFE 1923 Culvert Replacement Between Govan And Odair

Courtesy of the NPRHA.

BN AFE Index Card-Govan

Courtesy of the PNRA and Aaron Schwarz.

1915 NP AFE Govan ROW Fence

Courtesy of the NPRHA.

See Double-you Saturday!!

Photo courtesy of Blair Kooistra.

Blair says:

"Burlington Northern's CW Local has minimal tonnage and no revenue in tow as it passes beneath US Highway 2 near Govan, Washington, on September 27, 1980. By the end of the day, though, a full train of boxcars and covered hoppers loaded with wheat will tax the gathered seven locomotives assigned to the train--an A-B set of F-units and five geeps.

"Amid all the former Great Northern and Northern Pacific F-units working for BN in the Pacific Northwest, the train is led improbably by a former Spokane, Portland & Seattle locomotive, 712, a late-version (November 1948) F3A built as SP&S 802.

"The 712 led a curious career following the 1970 BN merger, continuing to work passenger trains in the Pacific Northwest until Amtrak's start in 1971 as the BN 9752. In 1972, she and her five sister SP&S F-units were converted to rotary snowplow power plants and renumbered into the 97255X series, painted in mineral red. BN's motive power shortage brought on by growth of Powder River coal brought the snowplow units back to regular service in their red paint and original BN numbers in 1974; she received green paint and her final BN number, 712 around 1976, assigned to the Spokane area. It was retired about a year after this photo, and finally scrapped in Tacoma in 1982."

College Train To Big Bend In May

From the "Spokesman Review."

May 12, 1912

Galloping Goose

From the "Spokesman Review."

February 26, 1950

"Magellan"

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

April 4, 2019

Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan must have relied heavily on his cosmographer and sextant when he set out on the “Peaceful Sea” in search of fame and fortune while finding a westward route to the Spice Islands on board his flagship Trinidad on behalf of the Spanish Crown, eventually achieving the near circumnavigation of the globe five-hundred years ago. I imagine. I imagine his trepidation of the coming storms and mutinies immixed with the tenacity of an explorer par none. I imagine. I imagine myself as Fernão de Magalhães gazing into an endless night of scintillating stars forever. In lieu of finding islands of spice somewhere beyond the cosmic horizon, I’m in search of edible gold collected on Iles along a fixed course navigated some 130 years prior. A captain at the helm of my landbound ship pitching and yawing slowly stabbing westward across an infinite sea of undulating earthen-brown waves unending; a sea in near permanent stasis. Of land. Scape. Earth. Sediment. Shaped. Violently. Over eons now cultivated into an ocean of gold; a copious campaign where the seeds of bread are born and borne; matrix of the cornucopia that feeds the world. And no matter how many times I embark on this Sisyphean voyage, I too feel the trepidation and tenacity of a modern-day explorer as I push the black pitch of twinkling night before me to the next island, and the next, and the next, ad infinitum.

“Concrete and Steel Sunset”

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

April 14, 2017

The sun has turned her back on the day as she always does. Taking back what she had given freely only hours ago. Yet the scene plays nicely to a Zwielicht capture though pushing the limits of limited light necessitating a high ISO to record this “grainy” concrete and steel, pinkish-salmon like sunset image of an eastbound Eastern Washington Gateway Railroad grain train slipping and snaking between the monolithic mortar elevators through the downgrade S-curve at Govan just as one of the less than five residents passes me with a curious stare, obviously wondering what in the world I’m doing only to realize – no doubt – the object of my focus when she meets and waits for the train to pass at the next and last bucked “town” grade crossing.

Govan Station Plat

Courtesy of the GN-NP Joint Archive.

 

1937 Govan Area View

Courtesy of the NP Telltale.

The bridge is along what we now know as US 2, looking northwest. At the time, the highway was known as State Highway No. 2, the Sunset Highway.

1973 BN Consolidated Annual Station Earnings-4

Courtesty of Aaron Schwarz.

“Ex Oriente Lux : Govan Crepusculum”

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

March 3, 2017

   

Heaven’s peaceful eye, rising, faithfully, effortlessly, paints her ephemeral pastel chef d’oeuvre as wispy clouds float across its crepuscular creation on a stiff morning breeze. At Fahrenheit 32 - on the cusp of stasis - opaline snow, slowly, still, steadily recedes to reveal the forlorn landscape as it has and will for millennia past and future. And though winter is a stubborn old man, she breaks his frozen fingers to thaw her earth by day only to let him reclaim his icy grip upon her orb overnight wreaking havoc on the vulnerable infrastructure of this venerable railroad forever known as the “CW” (Central Washington Railroad). At MP82, just a few jointed-rail-sticks west of the ghost town of Govan (elevator in the right background), Engineer Jerry Miller helms Eastern Washington Gateway’s HM02-2 as it undulates the contour of the steppe-like topography, like the sun, rising and descending ad infinitum the train begins its increasing to 1% corniche drop into Rattlesnake Gulch along Jarchow and Bender Lake, crossing Childers and Corbett Draw all the while dwindling the few miles to the next hamlet of Almira at a comfortable twenty some-odd miles per turn of the hand with thirty-in-tow “mtys” destined for the waiting grain spouts and the hardy men that man them twenty-four more miles down-the-line at end-of-the-line Coulee City where Jerry and his Conductor F. M. Simon, calling it a day’s work, will tie down and tie up. 

"Ghost Town Poltergeist"

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

 February 3, 2017

In the dead of night when grave diggers and trainmen earn their living butted SD45’s come to rest in the ghost town of Govan: the crew has died on time. Many moons ago, a thriving community with depot along the 1889 laid Central Washington Railway, Govan is likewise dead save for three horizon-piercing concreted and corrugated elevators; more abandoned homesteads than inhabited; and flee-bitten, howling hounds that roam the channeled scablands infinite. There is no light to see of where black steam-belching-shovels had extracted sand nearby so vital to constructing the railway but for the train’s temporal beam searching the right-of-way and van lights with its relief crew finding the 645’s breaking the damned silence, filling the coulees like the prehistoric waters that flowed here with the industrious sound of railroading that brought forth this place from nothing just as it has sustained its agricultural significance even as the town itself died. Eponymic of R.B. Govan, CWR’s construction engineer, it is but a fly speck on modern Columbia Plateau cartography. Its bustling business district incinerated in 1927, the sum 100 or so residents faded into unrecorded history as Govan’s coup de grâce came in ‘33: US 2 bypassing it by a half mile. The still-standing, believed-haunted schoolhouse shuttered in ‘42; the post office in ‘67 about the time these EMD’s came to life. They’ll soon be in rested hogger’s hands: he’ll crack the throttle breaking deeper into the disquieting quietus as the six-thousand horses rare to pull the slack out of so many drawbars bringing the train further west to posit ravenous empties under grain-gorged spouts far and fewer betwixt this place of shadows and dust, and the abbreviated “CW” terminus, Coulee City. “Hiball!” The throaty roar and rhythmic clickity-clack of steel wheels hitting jointed rail-ends Doppler as the coupled procession disappears into the envelop of night like a wandering poltergeist; its headlight pushes ahead into the unending frozen darkness in search of the next grain-bearing elevator in an all-but-forgotten community rousing the dead and still-living alike. 

Govan Ghosts

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

January 10, 2018

Eerily silent – the florescent landing lights and glow of what at first glance appears to be an alien craft counting down to liftoff thrusting its rocket, spear-like plume of light cutting into the black, fog-cloaked pitch of Govan. A Ghost “town” of near nil inhabitants living, of a schoolhouse haunted, of infernos past repeated, and of bloody ax murders unsolved. A Dantean “place” that may as well be the netherworld: able to unnerve the steadiest of souls…in the dead of night. Mangy dogs unseen growling; howling packs of yipping coyotes in the distance near; faint shadows of concrete elevators monolithic; wraiths appear staring out from broken tattered-curtain windows of homesteads homeless. Ice-cased from the brume atmosphere the earthbound tunnel motor has just come to rest holding the CW main pending a relief crew to take her and train farther west. Further. Into twilight.

“Hot Rail Govan”

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

March 12, 2017

For those unawares of the term “Hot Rail!” - that’s, obviously, Railroader’s speak to warn fellow crew members of a train's imminent approach as here in the pitch of night at Govan on the Eastern Washington Gateway. For the anticipatory effect, I’ve chosen to omit the train save for its impending, unmistakable, piercing beam that pushes aside the curtain of darkness to make way for its forward progress as the damp rails ahead of its approach light up as if electrically charged, and, indeed, appear to be quite white “Hot!”