#70mph

Heeding the call of the day: 

It’s 1995, an unremarkable Saturday evening.  Nobody won the Powerball Lotto (again) and the $101 million jackpot rolled over...  President Bill Clinton grew terse and impatient with the fiscally-irresponsible Republican lawmakers who had just killed their own “Balanced Budget Amendment”...  A break occurred in the West Coast’s seasonally heavy rain and snow... 

The low Springtime sunset shines on the silver and scarlet of Atchison,Topeka & Santa Fe’s Eastbound hot Oakland-Chicago intermodal train, #981, pointed up by 4000hp “dash 8″ GE B40-8W #508, breaking 70mph through the ATS signaled tracks of Cadiz, California.  I like to think that photographer Ron Flanary (his pic) flaunted panned the 55mph federally-mandated speed limit imposed by the “National Maximum Speed Law” on that day.  Hot intermodal was competing with the interstate trucking industry and it was the heyday of State Troopers in “Smokey Bear” hats, ticket traps and radar guns.

In December of 1995, the 55mph law would be repealed; on January 1, 1997, AT&SF and BN (after 2-years of interference from the Teamsters Union) finally became the integrated intermodal heavy-weight, BNSF.  The ATS on this section allowed speeds up to 90mph, but was only required by trains going 79mph or more.  The dash-8′s published top-speed is 70mph.

While, in hindsight, much serendipity and prescience seems unlikely, I like to think that a pun-minded AT&SF dispatcher issued the train crew of train #981 Special Instructions when they left Oakland on this particular spring day, with a commandment: 

“March Forth!”

Saturday, March 4, 1995.