Riding the 1981 CSRM Special

Ex-Espee (Southern Pacific) GS-4 #4449, photographed in June 1981 near Mt. Shasta, Calif., on the California Railfair Special. This standard gauge 4-8-4 Northern, with its colorful streamlined cowling, is based in Portland, Ore. The special was operated in conjunction with the grand opening of the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Standard gauge is four feet 8½-inches between the rails, making #4449 nearly three times as heavy (and twice as long) as the little Colorado K-28s.

"Recovered" from a Portland park for the Ross Rowland-financed American Freedom Train of 1976, #4449 now operates excursion trains in Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and California. It once proudly (and single-handedly) hauled Southern Pacific's streamliner The Coast Starlight between Los Angeles and Portland. It's my favorite standard gauge locomotive, a thing of beauty at rest and poetry in motion. As you'd expect, there is a dedicated #4449 web site with the American Freedom Train color scheme.

Espee is, of course, now part of the Union Pacific Railroad network, along with Missouri Pacific, Western Pacific, and Denver & Rio Grande Western. It's the end of a history that started in 1903 when financier and Wall Street tycoon-turned later-day railroad magnate E.H. (Edward Herman) Harriman owned both UP and SP railroads and was thwarted in his attempts to consolidate them by Teddy Roosevelt's anti-monopoly government. E.H.'s son, Averill, former governor of New York and U.S. ambassador to the Vietnam peace talks in Paris, started the Sun Valley ski resort and introduced then-novelty streamliners to the world of working-for-a-living passengers.

Southern Pacific was the conglomerate formed by the Big Four who built the Central Pacific (western) end of the nation's first transcontinental railroad. Leland Stanford was elected governor of California, because as the railroad's first real advocate, he also schemed to promote the state's economic interests. He and his wife, Jane, later built commemorate their late son, Leland Jr.

Mark Hopkins, the railroad bookkeeper, built his San Francisco mansion on the site now occupied by the Mark Hopkins Hotel. A story is told of him walking the tracks and finding a loose spike. A maintenance foreman, knowing Hopkins' acid tongue and quick anger, hurried up to him: "Oh, thank you, Mr. Hopkins. I was so worried, I've had a crew of men looking for that spike for a week."

Charles Crocker, was the man who came up with hiring the hard-working, successful Chinese immigrants to build "his" railroad. The least well educated of the four, he felt himself inferior throughout his association with the Big Four. He sold and repurchased and sold again his share of the railroad. It can be said, however, that Central Pacific's line across the Sierra Nevadas to Salt Lake City couldn't have been constructed without his imagination and grasp of necessity.

Collis Huntington became SP's biggest booster, lobbyist, and manipulator. As an example, he convinced Congress to pay mountain construction rates for a nearly-level 14 mile section east of Sacramento, CA, because its soil was minerally the same as the mountains. The railroad would never have been finished without his heavy hand, but he was usually identified as one of the "robber barons." His nephew and heir, Henry, started and endowed the Huntington Library collection with the fortune he inherited from Collis. Henry also married Collis' widow.

A fifth, Theodore Judah, was the railroad's mastermind and the dreamer who convinced Crocker, Hopkins, Huntington, and Stanford to spend the rest of their lives managing and financing the monster they created. Judah died in 1862 of malaria, never seeing his brainchild reach fruition. His widow later sued the Big Four, seeking acknowledgement from them of her husband's part in the railroad, and she won.

By 1869, when the Golden Spike ceremony captivated the entire nation (with as much hoopla as when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969), the Big Four had already spun off the Central Pacific and sold it to themselves, incorporated as Southern Pacific. The railroad's four builders subsequently pushed a line of steel across the Great American desert of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, all the way to New Orleans, creating a second transcontinental route—not bad for four obscure dry-goods shopkeepers who listened to "Crazy Judah" weave his railroad tales.

SP, with its web of trackage throughout California, came to be called "The Octopus."—after the muckraking 1901 Frank Norris novel which detailed the railroad's stranglehold on the state and the economic "enslavement" this virtual transportation monopoly had on the farmers and merchants. Those with no other mechanism for shipping their goods came to hate Huntington and the railroad.

The microwave communications network Espee built for train-control and data transmission is the backbone of Sprint Communications (the 10-cents a minute people). Railroad insiders knew SPTCo was in trouble when its San Francisco management spun off and sold the Sprint network. Then they tried to sell the railroad to the Santa Fe, which operated jointly for two years and then was forced to divest. The UP/SP merger came as no surprise.