Railroad crews rebuild washed-out tracks in Southern Nevada

CALIENTE - Round-the-clock work continued Wednesday in an isolated Southern Nevada canyon to rebuild washed-out tracks and restore rail freight service on a key Union Pacific line to the West Coast.

Railroad officials touring the 85-mile work zone declared repairs 40 percent complete and said they intend to restore limited freight service Monday between the Midwest and the storm-battered West.

The railroad also set a Monday goal to resume service on the Coast Line, a north-south California rail line linking Los Angeles and San Francisco for freight and passenger service. Heavy rain and surf triggered washouts, sinkholes and covered the track with mud over a 139-mile stretch that runs next to the Pacific Ocean between Guadalupe and Moorpark, Calif.

In Nevada, flooding last week washed away one-half mile of track near this railroad town, about 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The flooding toppled about a third of the 67 cars of one train parked on a creek-side siding. It washed away telephone poles and electric lines, severed canyon access roads, stranded another 80-car train hauling tractor-trailer boxes, and forced Union Pacific to suspend traffic on the main line from Salt Lake City through Las Vegas to California. Farther up the tracks, rushing water undercut rail lines in 20 locations.

"Part of the story is the Herculean effort here," said Dennis Duffy, the railroad's Omaha, Neb.-based executive vice president of operations. He watched giant earth-moving machines and dump trucks hauling rock to shore up embankments so track-laying machines could creep forward.

"But another part is the economy," he said. "We lost one-third of our capacity to Los Angeles ports."

Twenty-four percent of Union Pacific shipments originate from or are destined for Los Angeles, company officials said. The route through the normally dry Meadow Valley Wash usually carries about 25 trains a day - some about two miles long.

Officials called the economic effect of a halt in train traffic significant but undetermined - even by the Union Pacific accountants working nearby in a trailer camp resembling a field army base.

"This has national implications," Duffy said. "We're going to do everything we can to mitigate it. We have 650 customers in Las Vegas alone."

A limited number of customers awaiting coal, lumber, grain, automobiles, and liquefied chlorine for drinking water purification were being served by a slow 515-mile detour through northern Nevada and the snowbound Sierra Nevada.

The rest will have to wait for repairs to be completed by crews working 12-hour shifts and sleeping in Pullman-style tractor-trailers. More than 70 cranes, bulldozers, graders and trucks gulping 4,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day were on the job.

Tractors spun their tracks in mud dragging an empty 70-foot box car out of the still-rushing muddy brown water. A blue boxcar containing kitchen stoves and microwaves lay on its side, several hundred yards downstream.

Upstream, workers used hand shovels to unearth a trestle buried under 6 feet of silt, dirt and rock.

"It was a tsunami of sand," said Paul Dannelly, Salt Lake City-based coordinator for the repairs.

Dannelly compared the rebuilding to the first time tracks were laid through the canyon and to a yearlong project in 1910 to replace them after heavy flooding. Surveyors found no suitable alternate route, so the tracks were rebuilt along the same wash.

"For a guy like me, this is the ultimate event," he said. "This is a disaster, don't get me wrong. But it wasn't caused by anybody. And it didn't hurt anybody."

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On the Net: Union Pacific Railroad: www.up.com