Tom,
Sit back and get comfy as you got me going……………..
As i reported earlier i do not recall any discussions of ore trains going around the horn in Q days from my coworkers. Again as i added that didn’t mean it never happened,i just dont recall ever hearing about it. Now i will expand on some other aspects about the lines and their business carried. As can be understood reading Earls article he had access to far more information than a little brakeman/Conductor. More on that later.
The westbound empty boxcar trains around the horn were called extra norths.
Note that Earl didn’t discuss coal trains in Q days and that would be because there weren’t any eastbound into Savanna. The closest thing to unit coal trains were the eastbound coal drags coming up from the Southern IL coal fields into Galesburg and then onto Chicago. The Q did have a large amount of coal business towards the north but that would have gone on the pea vine.
I do not have any BN ETTs and Earl states the speed limit on the Denrock-Mendota line was 40MPH. I recall 30 MPH as a constant. Also keep in mind the decision to send an Eastbound train “around the horn” instead of on the C&I would have been made by the Chief Dispatcher not the trick or line dispatcher as the chief has a better feel for the overall picture on numerous lines. Same with how many and which way to deadhead crews.
Earls discussion of the “moonlight Job” from Mendota to Barstow is correct except i understand that the job didn’t exist after the BN merger or very shortly after it.I am working on a BRHS article on the “Moonlight Job” which will discuss its history from the 1890s up until merger and go through how the run was changed over the decades. At different times it operated through to Rock island.It will be a case study of how the Q fought for the farm equipment business against the Rock,Milw and CNW and then later the trucks. It was the trucks that killed the moonlight job and farm equipment by rail. Eventually that job was repalced(to some extent) by another local that ill explain further along.
Now let’s move on to early decades of the BN. In my BN years of ‘73-‘80 i never saw,worked or heard of a unit coal train going around the horn. Could it have happened in a tough situation,sure. But let me assure you the traffic being handled Denrock-Mendota was literally tearing the RR apart. I spent 3 days on a rail pick up work train on the branch sometime in the mid ‘70s. We started out each day with a long string of empty gons and stopped every few hundred feet to pick up broken rails that were laying in the weeds.
We picked up hundreds and hundreds of broken rails. The roadmaster was riding in a gon with his notebook listing where he noted rails to pick up. We had a burro crane riding a gon to grab the rails. But sitting in the cab of the loco we could spot rails consistently that weren’t in his book. They were everywhere. Remember this was the second hand relay rail from a mainline project that had gone through the rail shop and been shortened to 33 feet lengths. The occasional potash trains and those,what seemed to be one or two a day underpowered drags that went around the horn were destroying the line. There was “Jonnie Schmidt’s” potash pile from a prior unit train derailment where dead vegetation and pink potash marked the spot for years.
Now let’s discuss the potash trains. Again i can only discuss based on what I’ve seen. My first experience with a potash trains was 1968 or ‘69 when i was the unofficial “machinist helper” at Eola roundhouse on Sunday’s . One day “Big John” says to me go down to Ohio St on your home and take a look at the GP-7 derailed at the end of the track. Somewhere in my photo collection i have pictures of a jeep 7 jackknifed between a half loaded scrap gon at Gordon scrap on the industrial lead and potash covered hoppers. Seems in those days the potash trains went to Eola not Mendota and were switched around in the east yard. Also about this time management was refusing to pay “air pay” to the switch crews except in certain circumstances. So as i understand the explanation i heard was that when the east yard switch foreman was given a list of potash cars to dig out he coupled into the string but didn’t put air into the potash cars. Now any one familiar with the east yard at Eola knows that once you got just a little west of the switchmans overhead signal shanty it was a steep down ward grade out to Mc Clure road and beyond. “Velvet” was the engineer on the jeep and he followed the “educated hand”signals he received and backed up westward until he received a stop signal from the signal above the switchmans signal shanty. It was then he quickly learned that the engine brakes were not going to stop that string of 100 ton potash loads. He road her out until movement stopped when banged against the gon at Gordon’s scrap.
Now, i cant say if it was that incident or something else that caused the switching and distribution of the unit potash trains to be moved to Mendota in the north yard there. What i also cant say is did some potash trains move over the C&I when they were destined to Eola? I just dont know.
Now back to the discussion of the decision to rip out the Denrock-Mendota line that Earl covered so well. Here’s a different perspective from my personal experience. My very first run as a Conductor was on #11643 that operated Eola-Savanna via Mendota and Denrock one day and back from Savanna-Eola the next via the C&I. There were two turns on those jobs so the branch had service 6 days a week. The day i was called as an “emergency” conductor for the job the entire crew had “laid off”. When i learned all 4 us were extra i thought why would the entire crew layoff ? Well i found out at Mendota when we were told to pick up 25 cars to be distributed All along the branch to industries, fertilizer plants,,etc,etc. Next morning at Savanna it was the same thing 25 cars to handle on the C&I. So much for the business drying up. Well at least the local stuff. Why 25 cars both days. The division management had instructions to the yards that 25 cars were the limit on these runs.
But soon one turn was abolished then the second and local service on the branch and C&I was a to be handled by crews called at Savanna eastbound on an as needed basis. These crews would most likely have deadheaded home so at the time i thought this was smart business and being more efficient. Needless to say the pool crews,used to riding the run through trains were non too happy. But as needed quickly seemed to become once in a great while and cars would pile up in Savanna. Sometimes a through train going around the horn would be given a couple cars to spot somewhere when the customer had finally gotten someone’s attention. Then i went to work in the regional office building and while discussing this pattern with my boss and showing him the number of cars piling up. His comment was “that’s because they want to abandon” the line. Then i understood.
Leo
On May 23, 2026, at 10:05 AM, Tom Mack via groups.io <thommack=yahoo.com@groups.io> wrote:
On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 08:42 AM, Roger Kujawa wrote:
This was also in the FOBNR archives...
On Tue, Jan 7, 2025 at 09:33 AM, Leo Phillipp wrote:
The oral history I've heard from Aurora Div.Q men was ore trains headed toward Chicago area traversed the C&I. I’ve never heard of an ore train nor coal train going around the horn. Not saying it didn’t ever happen.
In parts 1 & 2 of working the C&I pool articles in Friends of the BN, I discuss taking unit potash trains around the horn.
While the original thread for this new message was from Roger Kujawa regarding an abandoned train on the MILW, what really caught my eye and was much appreciated was Earl Currie's article in the 2007 BN Expediter "'Round the Horn: A Valuable Piece of Railroad". Under the "History and background" section, Earl said the Mendota-Denrock line was used for "eastbound unit trains of taconite and potash" as well as "westbound trains of empty cars being returned to loading points west of the Twin Cities". He clarifies the westbound moves later in this section saying "The alternate route was also used for westbound trains of empty cars being returned to loading points west of the Twin Cities. Often, a single GP30, 35 or 40 locomotive was used on a train of 100 to as many as 180 empties. This practice kept such slow-moving trains off the C&I, and avoided the problem of sidings being too short for such long trains to meet opposing trains on a single-track line."
I recall some discussions of how the Q got all the GN and NP boxcars carrying lumber, etc. from the PNW to points east back to the GN and NP in the Twin Cities. It was noted that many times the Q brought all these cars to Cicero where they were combined into a single long Extra to return an entire empty train back the GN and NP (with I'm sure SP&S thrown in as well). From my wheel report studies this makes a lot of sense since a huge percentage of the eastbound loaded boxcar traffic, especially lumber and other wood derived products, came through in Hill Road GN and NP box cars. Since Earl (whose 2022 obituary was in BB66) is no longer with us, I wonder if the FOBNR would let the BRHS reprint this article? It has some great information that I think will be helpful to CB&Q modelers and historians.
Special note to Leo: It appeared to me that Earl's section on the "History and background" is based on Q history and operations (including special notes on ore, taconite, and empty westbound Extras) because his next section is "Operating post-merger (1970)". Unfortunately, Earl is no longer around to expound on this. I'd like your take on this based on what you said in 2025. I highly respect your experience. I'm thinking that based on what you heard, maybe ore trains ended up on the C&I as often as they went Around the Horn. Maybe it was just a dispatcher's prerogative or depended on other external factors (weather and related locomotive adhesion issues - don't want to stall an ore train with wheel slip) whether to send the train from Savanna down the C&I or Around the Horn?
--
Tom Mack
Cincinnati, OH
Modeling Chicago-Mpls/StP 1965-merger
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