entire UP system to nearly crawl to a stop. In a word, it came to be known as the “meltdown,” and it took months and months before the railroad was operat- ing smoothly again. Part of the fix was to institute directional running be- tween Texarkana and Big Sandy, virtu- ally eliminating meets on those lines and making them more fluid. UP desig- nated the ex-Cotton Belt as the west- bound line, and the T&P as the east- bound.
Current Operations
As it stands today, virtually all traf- fic on the Pine Bluff Sub is westbound. Between Big Sandy and Marshall, Tex., the lion’s share of traffic heads east, and virtually all traffic between Marshall and Texarkana (on the Little Rock Sub) is northbound. Westbound “through” trains coming off KCS’s Meridian Speedway, as well as empty UP rock trains headed for Chico, Tex.,
(northwest of Fort Worth) use the Reisor (pronounced “ree-ser”) Sub between Shreveport, La., and Marshall and con- tinue on through Big Sandy on the Mi- neola Sub. Amtrak trains Nos. 21 and 22,
the Texas Eagle, run between
Chicago and San Antonio, Tex., and use the Mineola Sub in both directions. UP dispatchers control the entire Mi- neola Sub using Centralized Traffic Control (CTC), transferring track au-
thority to train crews via wayside sig- nals. Likewise, they control virtually the entire Pine Bluff and Corsicana Subs using CTC; the only exception is a four-mile “island” of automatic block signals in Tyler, where dispatchers use track warrants to give trains authority. The Pine Bluff Sub approaches Big Sandy generally from the northeast, and the Mineola Sub slices through town approximately on an east-west
RIGHT: The engineer of an eastbound UP rock train in the hole at Big Sandy checks the left side of his power, watching out for another eastbound the dispatcher is running around his train on January 17, 2008. BELOW: With a block of reefers at the front of its consist, UP 4669 West roars out of Big Sandy on the Mineola Sub behind four EMD SD70M’s on August 4, 2007.
42 OCTOBER 2013 •
RAILFAN.COM
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