The Topeka Sub was not capable of handling much traffic. The rails were in good enough shape to maintain a 55 m.p.h. speed limit for freight and a 90 m.p.h. limit for passenger trains, and the route featured ABS (Automatic Block System) searchlight and sema- phore signals, but eight of the 11 sid- ings were less than a mile in length (six were under 4000 feet) and all the siding
spring switches had ten m.p.h. speed limits.
My slide box had few images from the Topeka Sub during the 1970s and 1980s. I managed two pictures of the lo- cal (which at one point had a rebuilt CF7 on the point), a shot of snow-cov- ered engines in the Lawrence yard, and a few images of my friend Scott Mor- gan, a Santa Fe extra board employee
who occasionally worked the Lawrence depot night shift. I kick myself for not getting better pictures of him hooping up orders to passing trains (he lost many of his extra board jobs when the railroad began delivering track war- rants by radio). I did not get any photos in those years of the coal train that served
the KPL (Kansas Power & Light) power plants in Lawrence and Tecumseh, the latter located about five miles east of Topeka. Only in the 1990s did I attempt to shoot the local (Local 31), because its schedule changed so that it headed west out of Argentine yard in Kansas City in the afternoon.
The Topeka Sub has hosted some colorful trains
over the years. OPPOSITE: Train
S-CHILBP1 (westbound Chicago-Long Beach stacker) is about to pass under U.S. 75 at MP 60.3 south of Pauline, Kansas, on December 21, 2005. This was an early Topeka Sub reroute. LEFT: A pair of Santa Fe-era yellow bonnets serve as manned helpers on the rear of a southbound Red Rock coal train at MP 60.3 south of Pauline on July 17, 1997. The up and down grades south of Topeka led to this unusual operation. Yes, Toto, we are in Kansas! BELOW: With a former Santa Fe war- bonnet on the point, a BNSF stack train is about to pass under the Kansas River bridge by Constant Park in Lawrence on July 14, 2008. It was one of a group of eastbound morning re-routes on the Topeka Sub.
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