| Title | Silver Zone Pass |
| Producer | Railway Productions |
| Format | DVD Wide Screen |
| Playing Time | 1 Hr 10 Min |
| Purchased From | RailFanDepot.com |
| Date Purchased | 10/10/12 |
| Price Paid | $24.95 |
This is the latest addition to my collection of RR DVDs and it is a very, very good video.
“Silver Zone Pass” gives us an excellent look at the northern Nevada portion of the old Western Pacific right of way from Salt Lake City to San Francisco. Construction on the WP route from Salt Lake City to San Francisco began in 1906 and was completed in 1910. This is now, of course, Union Pacific trackage, since their purchase of the WP in 1983. One special treat in the video is the appearnce at about the 47 minute mark of UP 1983, an SD70 ACe painted in the WP heritage scheme. This loco is used in regular service by the UP on the old WP trackage.
The image quality is superb and the wide screen format really enhances our ability to appreciate the beauty of the Nevada desert and mountains. For some reason this old WP line in Nevada has been ignored by the video producers; I don’t remember seeing any other videos on this subject in all of the browsing I have done. In many scenes there is desert in the foreground and snow capped peaks in the background. This line is traversed at night by both the westbound and eastbound California Zephyrs so that the spectacular scenery of the Sierras can be seen by the passengers in the daylight hours but it is a shame that this scenery cannot also be taken in by those on board. Yours truly rode this stretch of track as an 11 year old kid in 1960 when I accompanied my sister on one of her round trips from Chicago to San Francisco (Oakland) as a Zephyrette. I was sound asleep as we rode along these rails.
The journey begins at Burmester, just west of Salt Lake City, and we head west into Nevada until we are just east of Winnemucca. There is a 42 mile stretch of track across the Salt Flats that is perfectly straight. We then encounter the Arnold Loop which was constructed in 1914 to reduce the grade up to Silver Zone Pass to 1%. The summit of Silver Zone Pass is at 5875 feet in elevation. West of Silver Zone Pass we see the 5675 foot long Hogan Tunnel, Palisade Canyon, and the Humboldt River, and the Carlin Tunnels.
This is a DVD that I will watch again and again. I highly recommend it. Nice job, Railway Productions!
In 2008, R.J. Corman purchased QJ 2-10-2 #7040 from China, built in 1986. The locomotive was renumbered 2008 and is kept in Lexington on Corman’s Central Kentucky Lines (ex-L&N Winchester to Anchorage with CSX trackage rights into Louisville plus a couple of short branch lines. This includes the first railroad in Kentucky: Lexington thru Midway to Frankfort.) This locomotive is rarely operated and CSX will not allow it to run into Louisville. So when I learned that it would be at a festival in Midway on September 15th, I made plans to drive up to see it and asked former chapter member Cliff Downey to go along.
After lunch at one of the many vendors, we drove into Lexington to visit the new Corman locomotive facilities and yard. Overlooking these on the northeast side is a display of two former Helm SD40M-3 “shells” (no prime movers) rebuilt from ACL/SCL SD45s plus two cabooses. To the east the former L&N yard is now a parking lot for Rupp Arena while the new well ballasted Corman yard is the best looking yard I’ve ever seen. In the distance is the NS former Southern Railway mainline overpass. Around the locomotive facility we found a new Corman RailPower RP1500BD switcher, a GP9, a ex-D&RGW SD40T-2 tunnel motor, five GP38s and three GP-16s.
