First day of operations this year

I ran my first train of the season on the PE&A today. It might have been earlier in the month but other yard work has taken precedence the past two weeks, and today was the first day that I felt everything else in the yard was under control so I could shift my focus to railroad repair and maintenance. I had done cleanup in the train area over the past week or so, and today was focused on getting the track back in alignment and placing new ballast. The main track is now operational, and weather permitting, over the next week or so I'll turn my attention to continuing work on my upper loop.

Below are a few pictures from today's work:

First train of the year out on a test run once I got the track open. The SP&S boxcar in the back is a new car I picked up at the River City Modelers train show in Spokane about a month ago. It already had metal wheels and knuckler couplers so it was ready to roll.

Along the back fence a section of track has almost disappeared under dirt and bark. I blame our dog who loves to run along here chasing squirrels and barking at the neighbor dogs.

After clearing the track, it's more clearly visible how it has shifted quite a bit and was way out of alignment. The curve leading into this tangent was also out of whack.

I redefined the curve and held it in place with a number of stakes before placing ballast down. The ballast that had been here was all mixed into the soil.

A picture showing the finished track along the back fence.

I ran out of ballast and had to screen some more. I still have a few bags of 1/2"-minus gravel and I'm screening it down to 1/4"-minus. I'll need to get more this year.

A minor rockfall that was easily fixed. Had a few issues like this which wasn't unexpected.

I repaired this cribbing last year and it's in need of a rebuild again this year as several joints have broken and it has partially slid down the hill. I decided to replace it rather than repair it as it clearly isn't sufficient for this location.

I would have liked to use rock here but I've run out of available rocks, so I'm using some weathered concrete bricks instead. This should be pretty stable and not require so much work going forward. I still need to do trestle repair work and reattach a number of beams but I need to wait for slightly warmer and dryer weather. 

Here you can clearly see a sudden change in track slope. The issue here is the large rocks on the left are settling while the wooden trestle is staying in place,

As I can't really jack up the large rocks, I decided to just build up the track above the rocks, so this is the solution I came up with, at least for now. I'll replace the trestle pieces once the weather is better.

And here is another picture of the finished work with the test train rolling by.

And now for a few full scale train pictures from the past couple weeks. We were on the Fish Lake Trail west of Spokane on Friday and were passed by four trains that day, including a westbound mixed freight with a number of heavily grafittied refers. This is at a rock cut near Queen Lucas Lake.

Here is the same westbound train, now passing the signal for UP junction.

Lead locomotive on a westbound train at Latah Junction.

There are remnants of street running tracks all over Spokane but I hadn't noticed these until last week. Or perhaps I just hadn't walked by this particular intersection before? This is at Boone and Cincinnati, and are a relic of an electric trolley line. This line would have been built by the Spokane and Montrose Street Railway, which was reorganized as the Spokane Traction Company in 1903, and then the Spokane & Inland Empire Railroad in 1906, which I've written about in other blog posts.