BY GREG MONROE/PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR W


E ARE STANDING TRACKSIDE on a cold March morning in Peetz, Colo., a small farming community three miles south of the Nebraska state line. Ice, created by the early morning fog and overnight sub-freezing temperatures has coated bushes, poles, and wires and the many metal-topped buildings and can be heard thudding and clinking as it loosens in the growing warmth of the rising sun and slides down to the ground. A sheeting of ice cracks off the crossing signal arm lowering for the approaching westbound. A 300mm telephoto lens is on my camera


to emphasize and exaggerate the main line and mile-long siding rails dipping and rising dramatically on the rolling northeastern Colorado plains. Peetz (named for a former railroader) at MP 90 is the first Colorado town on the Northport, Neb., to Sterling, Colo., Angora Subdivision of BNSF Railway’s Powder River Division. Residents are friendly and quick to wave at a stranger standing beside the tracks with a camera, and one can hear the horns and growling of trains on the Union Pacific’s transcontinental line across central Nebraska and southern Wyoming a mere


15 air miles to the north over the horizon. A never-ending stream of 110 and 120 144,000-pound-car BNSF coal trains with DPU pushers pass this way from the massive coal fields of the 24,000-square- mile Powder River Basin near Gillette in northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana. They run southeast through Alliance and Northport in western Nebraska, south through Peetz into Sterling, southwest into Denver, then south to Pueblo in southern Colorado on their way to power plants in Texas and other states. It’s a veritable “coal corridor” some 375 miles long.


Moving coal from the Powder River Basin to markets in the southwest is the name of the game. A westbound BNSF coal drag sweeps through a curve between Roggen and Keenesburg, Colo.


46 AUGUST 2015 • RAILFAN.COM


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