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Herculean effort: Moving fire-damaged timber out of Arizona by rail

Timber by the trainload is nothing new for the Sierra Railroad.
During its 106-year history, the Oakdale, California-based short line has hauled millions of board feet of cedar, fir and pine to the sawmills of Tuolumne County.

The key word is "history," because raw timber has been a rare commodity on the railroad in the past 38 years, after Pickering Lumber stopped running trains out of the forest, onto Sierra track and into the Pickering mill at Standard.

But for four months this year, timber trains ran to that mill again -- coming not from the Stanislaus National Forest, but from fire-ravaged Arizona.

Through mid-May, Sierra Pacific Industries moved 24 trains of 60 cars each into Oakdale, where Sierra Railroad split the trains into 15 cars each for delivery to mills at Chinese, in western Tuolumne County, and Standard, about halfway between Sonora and Twain Harte.

The log trains, bobbing and weaving on the anything-but-flat-and-straight Sierra line, left even the most-seasoned railroaders in awe.

"The logs were the heaviest trains we've ever hauled," said Larry Ingold, the railroad's general manager.

How heavy is heavy?

"A 10-car gravel train in the '20s averaged 500 to 550 tons," Ingold said. "The 60-car log trains we received at Oakdale weighed in around 7,000 tons."

For 24 trains, that amounted to about 170,000 tons of timber or about 53 million board feet -- enough to build 5,300 houses.

Normally these days, the Sierra hauls finished lumber from Tuolumne County to Oakdale, on trains pulled by single 2,000-horsepower diesel locomotives.

The timber trains going into Tuolumne County needed a lot more: three diesel locomotives, each with 7,000 or 8,000 horsepower, for each 15-car train.

"This was the most horsepower we've ever used on the railroad," Ingold said.

Sierra's response matched the scope of the massive wildfires that swept central Arizona last summer. Some 469,000 acres burned in the largest blaze in the state's history, and included 300,000 acres primarily comprised of ponderosa pine owned by the White Mountain Apache Tribe.

With insufficient mill capacity in Arizona, the tribe put the salvage job out to bid last fall. Sierra Pacific was one of two bidders winning contracts to harvest an estimated 186 million board feet of timber from the reservation. Logging and shipment began in January.

SPI turned to Paneltech International of Hoquiam, WA, to coordinate loading and shipping the log trains to Chinese and Standard, and Susanville in Northeast California.

Said Lynne Busse, Paneltech's transportation manager: "We've moved unit trains before, but never this many this far or this fast."

Ingold gave the specifics: "It's 901 rail miles from the Apache Railroad reload at Snowflake, AZ, to the log deck at Standard.

"Once a train was delivered to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway at Holbrook, 38 miles north of Snowflake, we had the logs in Oakdale 36 hours later. That's a good show in any railroader's book."

The Sierra Railroad took over from there, and Ingold said, "We'd like to think we saved the best for last," referring to the challenges along the track through the foothills and into the mountains.

"In our 49 miles of main line, we have just 4,100 feet of level track," Ingold said. "The rest of the line is either going up or down, and there are a number of places where a (long) train is doing both at the same time."

The railroad goes round and round as well. "We have 156 curves in those 49 miles," Ingold said. "A big Class 1 carrier like BNSF tries to hold its maximum curvature to 8 degrees, 10 at the sharpest. Our curves run up to 16 degrees."

"At the intersection of Old Wards Ferry and Sanguinetti roads in East Sonora, our trains are pulling over a 3.5 percent grade around a 13-degree curve. Past that point, the engines on a Standard-bound log train are going downgrade toward Sullivan Creek, but the engineer is still working close to full throttle to pull the loads around the curve."

"You really have to know what you're doing to run a train on this railroad." - Ted Benson, The Modesto Bee, courtesy Larry W. Grant  {ALTAMONT PRESS RAILROAD NEWSLINE}
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