COMMENTARY ON RAILROADING AND RAILFANNING
www.railfan.com
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PUBLISHER Kevin EuDaly
EDITOR
E. Steven Barry
editor@railfan.com
The Keewatin Central mixed train to Pukatawagan continues to provide an important link between The Pas and the First Nations population in remote Manitoba. DENIS E. CONNELL PHOTO
Mixed Train, Not-So-Daily
IN 1947, LUCIUS BEEBE — who was perhaps the most important railfan author of all time — published Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. The volume was the culmination of Beebe’s many years riding, watching, and photographing the obscure and anachronistic fringes of the North American railway map. At the heart of his project was the titular “mixed train”: a kind of operation wherein passenger cars are tacked onto a freight train, thus “mixing” the types of traffic together. A mixed could be harrowing for a traveler, mostly due to their uncertain progress. One 1880s mixed train passenger in Oregon, Theodore Thurston Geer, described how his locomotive “left the train at the depot and went up town and was gone nearly a half hour.” This was not an unusual pace for a mixed, both in 1880 or later; mixeds made stops along their routes to work industries, thus rarely keeping a timely schedule. Ultimately, his 50-mile journey took eight hours — an average speed of just six miles per hour! The equipment on Geer’s train was rather the worse for wear, leaving him drenched in rain and nearly shaken to death. While extreme, this, too, was part of
the mixed’s character. Providing the bare minimum of service, they were thus typically assigned the oldest and least luxurious of cars. There were no Pullman Palace cars, no walnut-paneled smokers, no dinners in the diner. While Geer’s mixed did not survive
past the 1890s, many such trains continued to operate well into Beebe’s time, and even later. Typically, these operations survived because the territory they traversed was remote. Populations
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RAILFAN.COM
were typically so low that there wasn’t enough business to justify a dedicated passenger train. With the introduction of mass-produced vehicles, the automobile became an ever more affordable purchase. Starting in the 1920s, government-financed roads began to crisscross the nation, linking even the smallest of towns into a national highway network. The bottom line began to fall out on rail passenger service in general. Following World War II, U.S. railway companies pushed the government to allow them to cancel money-losing passenger trains with the axe focused on secondary routes. The postwar era also saw major changes to rural North America. First, just as railroads began to merge together to form fewer and larger systems, so too did their industrial customers. At the same time, more and more people moved from the countryside into the cities, seeking better jobs and better standards of living. This rural outmigration, combined with industrial consolidation, ate into the traffic of the routes held down by the mixed. What Beebe had sought — the “mixed train daily” — was less and less frequent, dropping to a few times a week, weekly, or out of existence entirely. This month, we compare Jim Boyd’s experience on the Georgia Mixeds of the late 1960s (page 52) with Denis Connell’s recent ride on the mixed train to remote Pukatawagan, Man., (page 46), the last of its kind in North America. Despite their modern settings, Beebe would have recognized the essential service that was provided by both.
Consulting Editor Alexander B. Craghead is a transportation historian, photographer, artist, and author.
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CONSULTING EDITOR Alexander B. Craghead
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