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... time will tell if UP's pockets are deep enough.
THE MORNING BREEZE coming in the open window of an SD40-2 flutters through the silver hair of Chuck Fleming. While the 45-year-old engineer delivers a lively commentary on bygone mine spurs and vanished lower-quadrant semaphores, his 7050-foot-long string of empty automobile cars floats across the high desert northeast of El Paso as if gliding over glass. Odd, how things worked out. His career, and the destiny of the Golden State Route across which train AMLKSB races, have both come full circle.
When Fleming followed his dad into Southern Pacific engine service in 1978, there was no work to be had here. This very line-from El Paso to a handoff with the Rock Island at Tucumcari, N.Mex., thence to Kansas City and points east-seemed in a death spiral. In 1946, in his father's youth, SP rostered 230 engineers and firemen between El Paso and Tucumcari. But by the late 1970's, two trains each way would be a busy day. There would come days when nothing moved. Fleming's seniority, in fact, began on SP's Sunset Route between San Antonio and El Paso, where business blossomed, in part at the expense of the Golden State.
So the revival of the Golden State from that low ebb (and Fleming's transfer to his dad's home turf) is a sort of railroading fairy tale now 20 years in the making. The first prince to come along, Southern Pacific, bought Rock Island's portion of the Golden State in 1980 and performed a thorough rehab that overcame years of deferred maintenance, and supported a train frequency of six to seven trains each way a day at speeds of up to 70 mph.
Now, following its 1996 purchase of SP, comes Union Pacific to do a makeover costing four times as much and fit for a king. UP's vision of the Golden State Route is a fast-freight main line handling twice as many trains as SP pushed across in the '80's.
After UP's $400 million investment is complete-probably in 2004-and the new, new Golden State Route is burnished steel, who should be scared? Over-the-road truckers, maybe. But what about Burlington Northern Santa Fe? Between Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, the big-buck, premium-priced, time-sensitive...