Browsing Tag: BNSF

(slow orchestral music) – [Voiceover] The following
program is a production of Pioneer Public Television. (slow orchestral music) This program on Pioneer
Public Television is funded by the Minnesota Arts and
Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the
vote of the people of Minnesota on
November 4, 2008. Additional support provided by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural
education retreat center in a beautiful prairie
setting near Windom in southwestern Minnesota,
shalomhillfarm.org. The Arrowwood Resort
and Conference Center, your ideal choice for
Minnesota resorts, offering luxury townhomes,
18 holes of golf, Darling Reflections Spa, Big Splash Waterpark,
and much more. Alexandria, Minnesota,
a relaxing vacation or great location for an
event, explorealex.com. Easy to get to, hard to leave. (slow orchestral music) – Welcome to Postcards,
our weekly look at the arts, history,
and cultural heritage of western Minnesota and beyond. I’m your host, Dana Johnson. This week we’ll learn
about steam engines with local engineers from
Willmar and ride the rails with Twin Cities and
Western Railroad. First, Tom Steinman,
Elmond Ekblad, and Bob Feichtinger
share with us their legendary
tales from the track. (moderately slow guitar music) (steam train whistle blows) (diesel train horn blares) – The railroad had
a certain romantic fascination, I think,
with a lot of kids. – Well, it’s probably
an odd term to use, but I think most
railroad men would agree that there was a certain romance with the steam engine,
you got to love ’em. – [Elmond] It was the idea
that you were on the move, there was something
about a steam engine that when you got it going,
if you worked it right, it put out a sound
like a sewing machine. (steam engine chugs) When you get in a diesel,
it’s just like getting in a truck and
going, there’s no, there’s no momentum there that there is when you
have a steam engine. – Diesel is much more
comfortable, of course, but there was something
romantic about a steam engine. – Not only the thrill of
that, either, but the thrill of the people off the track,
children, they just love the steam engines, they’d
come out along the track. A lot of places
where we see new kids would be, we’d
always have candy, there was always a
lot of entertainment. My interest in working
on the railroad, I guess I would have
to say it was a moment in Fulda, Minnesota, when
a locomotive engineer looked out of his cab down at
me, as a little five-year-old, and tossed a pack of
Black Jack gum down there. And when I saw
that, I told myself, “I would really like to be an
engineer driving locomotives.” And that stuck with
me for my entire life. And so in a way I sort
of was living a life of something that started
when I was just a young boy. – [Bob] Well, I started,
I started right after I got out of the
military, up in St. Cloud. And then I came to visit
a friend in Willmar, and he talked me
into hiring out here on the engine train,
engine service. – [Elmond] Then he
asked me if I wanted to go railroading,
and I said “Yeah.” Well, he says, he says,
“How old are you?” I says, “I’m 16.” Oh, he says, “You gotta
be 21.” (chuckles) Well, the next year, then
he came, and the boss down at the roundhouse,
they come back to me again and ask me if
I want to go railroading. And I says, “Yeah, but age.” He says, “We’ve
taken care of that.” I found out later
that they’d filled out a birth certificate, in
place of me being born in 1918, they showed
1915. (laughs) So I went to work, I was only
17 years old in place of 21. – [Tom] Actually, my first
job on the train itself was a fireman, and
the fireman was the assistant to the
locomotive engineer. I guess you could call
it an apprenticeship. And you had to get
the steam engine out of the roundhouse
in the morning, get it ready for the
engineer and the conductor and the crew to get on, and then when the day’s work was
done, it was your job to take the steam
engine to the roundhouse and, as we would call it,
put it to bed for the night. And after going out
and about in the world, uh, 1977, I came
back to the railroad, and I made a career
of it, and I just recently retired after
34 years on the railroad. – [Bob] There were many
interesting things. Four, five o’clock in the
morning, the sun come up, you’d be going across
the countryside, you’d see animals,
probably some farmer didn’t know he had a
fox in his backyard. The sun coming up, and… The crops waving in the wind. It was very picturesque to see. Just every trip was different,
every trip was different. Something unusual or
different would happen. It was, you never
knew what to expect. – [Elmond] Craziest
thing I’ve ever seen is, we come into
Charlesville, Minnesota, that’s between here
and Breckenridge. And we seen some
cattle on the track, and we figured, well, that’s
kind of usual, you know. But we got a little
closer, then I could see there was a red bull,
and this red bull, he kinda stood and
looked at us, and then when we got, I’d say,
about a hundred yards from it, he started
putting his head down, you know, and he
got a little closer. He started using
his hoof, and was, he was, he was gonna
show us who was boss! Well, we hit him, and we
just pulverized him. (laughs) And then, we had a new brakeman, and he had never, had never
worked on a trip before, and the first thing he
did, he put his head out the window, and wanted
to see what happened. Well, good thing I grabbed him and pulled him back in,
because one of the legs of the bull went right
by and broke the window, and he maybe would have
got killed. (laughs) That was pretty
unusual. (chuckles) That’s one thing I
never did forget. – [Tom] With the Barnum
and Bailey Circus trains, when the train would
actually park at Midway over in the Twin Cities,
it was quite an event. The animals in their
cages would be, wagons, wooden-wheeled wagons, and the elephants
would head down the main streets of St.
Paul or Minneapolis, headed to their big circus tent or the state fairgrounds
from the railroad siding, where they would park the
train, ’cause everybody wanted to come and see the circus
heading down the street from the railroad
yard, off to the tent. (diesel train engine roars) – [Elmond] Willmar is one
of the best railroad towns, smaller railroad towns in
Minnesota, and it’s been noted for that, as kind of a
headquarters, because trains went to St. Cloud and
they went to Sioux City, and we had locals
going out of here, they went to a lot of
towns, it was kind of a hub. And people always,
even people that lived in West Coast, they always
talked about Willmar. – I can’t imagine a town like
Willmar without a railroad. This railroad that
runs through Willmar, the railroads that run through other towns in
western Minnesota, are the through points of a lot of products that
are passing through, from the West Coast
of the United States to Chicago and the East
Coast, and vice versa. (connecting train cars clang) – [Elmond] And I like to,
and I like to be busy, and I like to have a challenge. And the biggest challenge we had on the railroad was the weather. We had to put up with
all kinds of weather. Snowstorms and, we went
out and plowed snow, you know, or left
Willmar and the snowbanks were four
or five feet high, but if we could get a
pretty good speed on, we could go quite a
ways through a drift. – [Tom] 1997 was
memorable in Willmar for being a winter of
ferocious blizzards. And in particular I remember,
one memorable night, going to Clara City,
that we not only went into the snowbank, but
we went through the snowbank and came
out the other end. And the train was
covered in snow by the time we came
out the other end. (diesel train hums) I guess the fondest
memories come from the camaraderie
of the other, fellow employees I
worked with, and talking about the good trips
we had, and of course grumbling about the
bad trips we had. – You miss the men, and
that’s why to this day I have coffee with
Elmond and some other railroad men, you
miss the camaraderie. – [Elmond] I never
had any trouble with the men working
with me on the railroad. They were very cooperative,
and out in a snowstorm, they tried to get
signals to me so I could see ’em when we
didn’t have radios. But between the
brakemen and myself, it seemed like there
wasn’t a situation that we couldn’t get
through some way. – If I would have to tell
anyone one particular thing that has had a lasting
memory for me as an employee of the railroad, was
the predictability that I was gonna
have a job tomorrow. I was very fortunate
that I was able to spend my entire
career with one employer. Most of the towns
across America are here because the railroad came
through that part of the state. In southern Minnesota and
particularly in Willmar. Willmar was a major
stopping-off point for trains, there’s a
lot of grain shipped out of Willmar, a lot of
ethanol, and a lot of lumber and
fertilizer that travels through Willmar on
its destinations, either near Chicago
or south to Iowa. A lot of these cars
and the entire train, which is called a
unit train, will stay in one piece all the way
to its final destination. And if it’s grain,
most commonly it goes all the way to Seattle or
Long Beach, California. Other trains go to
the Mississippi River to be unloaded on barges. It’s a diesel-electric
locomotive, and they’re extremely efficient. They’re so much more
efficient than trucks hauling products across
the country that a lot of trucks now are hauled
on railroad flatcars rather than a
tractor-trailer rig going across the country on the
interstate highway system. In 1920, as I recall, I think 2,000,000 people
worked on the railroad. And in 2010, it
was 200,000 people. So that’s one-tenth
the number of people. But the railroads are hauling
more than they ever have. There’s an efficiency
there that was missing for many, many years
until the 1980s. Trains are bigger, they’re
longer, they’re faster, and there’s fewer
people that are on the trains and
repairing the track. (moderate tempo piano music) – [Elmond] The reason
why I think this one is special, because this
was the first engine, steam engine, that
had pulled the Empire Builder
through the mountains. This was a, it wasn’t
big, it’s not small according to today,
but it was big enough, and was the first one,
on the Empire Builder. The superintendent, he
said we could have it, so we built a
track from the yard out here at a
curve, and hooked… Right where it stands right now. This historical society
would not be what it is today if we hadn’t gotten
that locomotive moved out here, because
that, people go by and they see that locomotive,
they’ve never been in Willmar, and
they’ll still stop in. – When I was a young boy, the passenger
trains did operate. My hometown,
Chandler, Minnesota. I can remember it just
like it was yesterday. My mother would take me
down to the train station, and I would get on the
train, and actually it was a steam-engine-powered
train, and I would go to Iona, Minnesota, to
stay with my grandparents. And it was 14 miles,
and it cost seven cents. And my mother would pin a
little note on my pocket, and the note would
say to the conductor, “Please make sure Tommy
gets off at Iona.” And then she would give me
10 cents for the ride back. Well, those days are long gone. (moderately slow guitar music) – To find out more
about these stories and other local
history, visit the Kandiyohi County Museum
in Willmar, Minnesota. Now let’s hop on board with
Twin Cities and Western Railroad and learn about its impact
on local communities. (train rumbles and hums) – [Ken] I love it
all, ’cause you learn something new every day,
every day is different. Every day is a
different day, you know. And you work with
different people all the time, and
it’s, it’s just fun. – Oh yeah, when I was
in, like, a little kid, I always wanted to be
a railroad engineer, and then I end up working
on this section here. Didn’t fall far from
the tree, I guess. – It’s pretty much
different every day, but this is, what
we’re doing now is one of the more
routine jobs that we do. – [Dana] Twin Cities and
Western Railroad has been a major part of transporting
goods across Minnesota. President Mark Wegner
provides rail service across southwestern Minnesota,
into the Twin Cities. – [Mark] Well, the history
is, it was originally built by the Hastings and
Dakota back in the 1870s. The Hastings and
Dakota became part of the Milwaukee Road,
and Milwaukee Road built the Pacific
extension in 1909. So this line here was
part of a main line from Chicago to
Tacoma, Washington. At one point it
boasted 80-mile-an-hour
passenger trains. (train wheels
rumble on the track) The rail industry
started to decline in the, after World War
II, a gradual decline, which accelerated during
the 1960s and ’70s, and by 1980 the Milwaukee
Road declared bankruptcy. They abandoned from
Montana to the West Coast. The Montana to the
Minnesota border was acquired by the
state of South Dakota, and the Milwaukee
retained from Ortonville into the Twin Cities,
as part of their system. They were sold in 1985 to
the Soo Line, and in 1991 the Soo Line sold the
segment from the Twin Cities out to Appleton to the
Twin Cities and Western, and hence we were
formed July 26, 1991. We serve south-central
Minnesota, basically our draw area is maybe 30 miles either side
of the main line. We go through Glencoe,
Olivia, Montevideo, out to Appleton,
along 212, primarily. We are like a spoke
in a great big hub. We connect in St. Paul
to the Canadian Pacific, the Burlington
Northern Santa Fe, the Union Pacific,
which serve the North American continent,
so we’re basically giving our customers a
gateway to the world. (train chugs and hums) – Today we’ll be spotting
in the grain cars for these elevators,
and we’ll go out to the Renville
sugar-beet plant, and get them empty
for their sugar. And today we got some
coal, coke on there and coal, and empty
sugar cars, and then we go out to Granite Falls,
the ethanol plant, we service that daily, and… (train bell rings) (train horn blares) – [Mark] The unique
thing about the Twin Cities and Western
is, we do connect with three major railroads
in the Twin Cities, so our customers
have competition to go on the North
American continent, which isn’t always true
of other railroads. They’re captive to
one single railroad. I think the railroad
will be important because the
steel-on-steel technology, steel wheels and steel rails,
is very low resistance, hence we achieve some great fuel economies for
the tonnage we move. Moving one ton of
freight 435 miles on one gallon of
fuel is often quoted. We’re roughly anywhere
between four times to 10 times more fuel
efficient than trucks, depending on whose
study you look at. But I think the nation
didn’t realize how important the railroads were
up until about 2003, when gas started to
go up and diesel hit five dollars a gallon,
then all of a sudden everybody wanted to ship rail. So if you think there’s
an unlimited supply of oil in the world,
yeah, we’ll go away, but I don’t think
that’s the case. – [Dana] Twin Cities
and Western Railroad also owns the
Minnesota Prairie Line. Julie Rath talks
about the efforts of the Minnesota Valley
Regional Railroad Authority, and their efforts to
restore the tracks. – And I’m sure it was
founded on the basis to provide services
for the ag community. We have an elevator
right behind us, and I don’t know the
year of that, but it says “number two” on it, so
it’s got quite a history. And it’s a vibrant
corridor for the communities that are along here. There are 16 communities
in the five counties that are dependent
on this rail service, and the actual railroad itself was revitalized again in 2002. It had various owners and
actually went inactive for two years, and
then the five counties took the ownership
back and formed the Minnesota Valley
Regional Rail Authority. You know, our rail line starts at Norwood Young America
and goes all the way to Hanley Falls, that’s
94 miles of track. And we’re currently
doing a rail restoration, a rehab project, and so
we’ve done 24 miles so far, and so we’re getting
there inch by inch. We always say, “I think
I can, I think I can,” and we will get that done. Well, we have a big
vision in that area, we have a group in
the Redwood area that’s called Tatanka
Bluffs, and our goal is to use the rail for vintage
passenger rail service, to bring people out
from Hopkins Depot for the weekend,
bring your bike with, and explore the southern
part of Minnesota, for biking, camping,
horseback riding, to see where Minnesota
history really happened. And we think that’s
key, ’cause a lot of the historic sites
that you learn about in your sixth-grade
history are really here, and we want to share that
with students, especially. There’s a big plan
for the future, and it’s all dependent
on this railway. I mean, it’s pretty
unique, aside from Amtrak, you just don’t hop on a train. So if we can get this
vintage rail service put together, that was
a very good attraction for some of the people
that are forming the history learning
center concept, just because it’s a
unique experience. It’s more authentic
travel, as you could say, and it takes the past and
brings it into the future. We’re seeing increased
traffic as we do the rehab. This past year we had
just under 7,000 cars, carloads that were
shipped on our line. Our funding that
we’re receiving, either through the
state of Minnesota or federal government,
is a huge investment in this type of
transportation corridor, which is key to the area. And for us to have that
kind of investment, we need to make sure
that we can leverage those dollars for
future development, whether it’s new manufacturers
that come out here, I see this as a
renewable-energy corridor because of the amount of biomass that we have in our
five-county area. And so personally, right
now we’re working on several bio-renewable
fuel projects that are dependent on this
rail getting restored. And what we’re doing
is replacing rail that’s from 1880, 1912, which is 80 or 85-pound rail,
with 115-pound rail. The new train cars are
286,000 pounds, and so we need a heavier rail for
them to run on, for safety. – Well, I guess I’m
kind of a historian by nature, and
realizing that railroads were the cause of
many town formations in Minnesota particularly,
yeah, I did follow the rail industry, and
if you look at some of the towns where the
rail has disappeared, you know, the towns are
kinda disappearing as well. So here, fortunately, we’re able to run a good
railroad, which in turn injects vibrancy into
the communities we serve. So, and we continue to do that. – Well, it’s
allowed the elevator in town here to
expand, which increases the employment base,
which brings more families to the communities, which
increases the schools, and grocery stores,
retail trade, everything is improved
because of the rail. – The builders of the
railroad tended to plant towns anywhere between seven
to 10 miles apart, basically a day trip
with a horse and buggy, to bring the grain
into town, so that’s kinda how the
towns were planted. We see ourselves as
renewing the towns’ economic bases, we
have relationships with the economic development
agencies, things like that. If we grow jobs in
south-central Minnesota and grow the communities we
serve, then we’ve done our job. – [Dana] In 2008, Twin
Cities and Western was named the Short Line
Railroad of the Year. With its ability to reach
the corners of the country, it’s no wonder people enjoy
being part of this rail service. – [Josh] I don’t know,
it’s something that not everybody gets to do. You know, you can
tell people stories about this stuff
that they don’t know anything about, so
they’re kinda interested in hearing what you have to say. – [Julie] I believe
that we will have additional expansion
happen in the future. Winthrop is an
excellent example, about 20 miles to the
east of us, that has had, because the rail’s
getting closer to that, the community can actually
see, feel, and touch the improvements, and are
planning for the future. They’ve added a new
fertilizer facility, they’ve had a new, um… WinField Ag Solutions
moved to the community, combining into a larger
distribution center. The ethanol plant
expanded, with the hope that the rail would expand. And yeah, UFC’s
congregated there, so they’ve got great
things going on. Dairy Farmers of America
is doing an expansion, they’re all dependent
on transporting
their goods by rail. (train horn blares) (diesel train engine rumbles) – Local author
Brent Olson shares his memories of
traveling by train. – I like railroads. It’s funny, but even though
my hometown of Clinton hasn’t even had a railroad
for 20 years or more, railroads have a large
place in my memory. An early memory is
dropping my sister off at the station in
Willmar for a trip to the West Coast to
stay with cousins. I can still picture her
walking across the tracks, carrying a small suitcase
and a large guitar. It wasn’t long after that, that I had my first
experience on a train. I was about 12,
and I was supposed to catch the train
from Minneapolis to Morris after a
stay at a church camp. It was my first time
traveling alone, and I bet it (laughs)
really showed. A chubby, blond preteen
clutching his ticket and sitting on the
edge of his seat must have looked like
a tempting target to the bum who kept
coming over to me and telling me
that if I came out behind the station,
he would sell me something really
good, really cheap. Now, I was dumb, but
maybe not quite that dumb. I tried to ignore
him, and when I saw a gaggle of nuns come
in and sit in a swirl of black and white, I
went and sat with them. That experience didn’t
turn me into a Catholic, but it did lead me to
my fondness for nuns. Despite that, I do
still love trains, possibly because
when my wife and I were married, we took
every cent we had in the world and spent it
on six weeks in Europe. A lot of that time
was spent on trains, playing an endless game of
gin rummy and occasionally glancing out the window
at the passing scenery. The rocking of the cars,
the chance meetings with interesting
people, odd foods at train stations
in odd countries, along with the constant company of a beautiful young
woman, made the trip something that remains
green in my memory. I am a lot older now, and contemplating
another train trip. The odd food isn’t nearly as big a temptation, but
not having to drive in strange traffic
is a big incentive. I do still have the same
traveling companion. Some things, like
trains, go on forever. Or close enough. – That’s all for this week. For more information,
go to our Web site, at pioneer.org/postcards. Join us again next
week on Postcards. – [Voiceover] This program
on Pioneer Public Television is funded by the Minnesota Arts
and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the
vote of the people of Minnesota on
November 4, 2008. Additional support provided by Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural
education retreat center in a beautiful prairie
setting near Windom in southwestern Minnesota,
shalomhillfarm.org. The Arrowwood Resort
and Conference Center, your ideal choice for
Minnesota resorts, offering luxury townhomes,
18 holes of golf, Darling Reflections Spa, Big Splash Waterpark,
and much more. Alexandria, Minnesota,
a relaxing vacation or great location for an
event, explorealex.com. Easy to get to, hard to leave. (slow orchestral music)