Train Festival 2011 organizers, California Zephyr Railcar Charters and the San Bernardino Railroad Historical Society regrets to announce the operation on Santa Fe steam locomotive #3751 to Rock Island, Il in July of 2011 has been suspended.

When planning of Train Festival 2011 began several months ago, we shared our proposal of steam locomotives and their proposed movements with high-ranking officials at BNSF Railway. Provided that they were to be Amtrak trains, we were told that BNSF would 'likely' approve our requests, including that of the ATSF 3751, from Los Angeles to Rock Island and return.

In the intervening time, circumstances have changed, and BNSF is now projecting greatly increased traffic volumes this summer on their Transcon corridor. This is great news for the railroad as traffic on the BNSF Railway continues to increase as the economy picks ups. Our trips would use the Transcon between Albuquerque and Los Angeles.

Steam specials are highly consumptive of management time, and of course attract hundreds, sometimes thousands, of railfans, which in turn requires significant efforts on the part of the railroad's police. The 3751 trip would have had us on the property for 18 days, during the time when traffic volumes would be at or near their peak.

For this reason, BNSF has reconsidered their position, and respectfully declined our proposed move of ATSF 3751 via the Transcon corridor to Train Festival 2011.

Other options are being explored to bring the #3751 East. In the meantime several excursions are being worked on and proposed for Train Festival 2011. They will be announced on the website http://www.trainfestival2011.com when they have received final approval.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused, no one is more disappointed than the organizers and the several months that have been invested in planning. We would like to thank the BNSF Railway and Amtrak for the hundreds of hours working on this routing.

Anyone that had purchased a ticket with the intention to ride behind the #3751 may get a FULL refund, hassle free. Just send your request to tickets@trainfestival2011.com and a refund will be given. Please provide the name the order was under in your request.

I can certainly respect BNSF's decision. Before the nay sayers step in please remember that BNSF has been one of the more steam friendly railroads and has presented legitimate concerns over this one particular excursion.

What I don't understand is why this trip was even announced prior to final approval. A railroad saying they will "likely" approve a movement is a whole lot different than saying the will approve a movement. I thought the general concensus of steam operators was to keep their mouth shut until the i's were dotted and T's were crossed? The pessemist in me kind of saw this coming. Following the announcement and amid all the 3751 hoopla, I noted that the Trainfestival2011 website verbage was quietly revised to state something to the effect of "we are continuing negotiations with BNSF to bring 3751" which told me right away that there had been some hickup in the plan

Bad news for steam fans, good news if you own Berkshire Hathaway stock.

As Homer Simpson would say, "D-Oh"

A factor in these kinds of trips that most railfans seem to forget is the marketing aspect of the trip. Even after Amtrak, BNSF, the 3751 group and the TrainFestival organizers have signed off on the move, you still need a trainload of people to raise funds for the move. To fill that trainload of people, you have to sell tickets, and for a trip this long, you have to sell tickets many months in advance.

With year's end fast approaching, and most companies and offices forcing people to plan their 2011 vacation days in December or early January, I'm sure Jason wanted to get the word out as soon as he could be reasonably sure the trip was going to happen, so he could have a chance to tap as much of the market as he could.

Imagine if BNSF hadn't given Jason final approval until March, so he waited to announce the trip. Then, when he announced it in mid-March, there wasn't enough of a customer base able to take the time off to fill the positioning moves from LA to Rock Island, so the trip would have to be canceled anyway. Jason would have gotten crucified for waiting so long to announce the trip. It's a double-edged sword.

- Chris

Unfortunately, this is the second year in a row that this sort of thing has happened with TrainFestival...but before you jump all over me (or Jason), it looks as though BNSF wanted to do this, originally. It's not like CSX, where they don't do this sort of thing at all...bad luck for steam, good for the railroad...hopefully 3751 can find another way out there! Maybe over UP trackage? What other routes could possibly be used?

Maybe just a quiet, main rods off, cold move in revenue service to Rock Island in time to put it all back together for the event. Possibly BNSF would be willing to move the engine that way at reduced cost or gratis?

@cblaz

Right on.

Don't get me wrong - I'm behind Jason 100% on this. It sucks, indeed. I hope that he can find another way to get 3751 there. Unlike with CSX and WMSR, there would only be one rail line to get from Cumberland to Potomac Eagle - but I imagine with 3751, there potentially is a number of other ways she could get to Rock Island. Who knows what other rail lines might step up to help out. :)

Not to be cynical or doubtful, but to get anything out of the LA Basin is going to require BNSF or UP and UP does not want to get involved with any non-UP steam operations/movements, no? Again, I wish Jason and his team the best but if it's going to happen it's going to have to involve BNSF to some extent if not the entire way to Rock Island. Jason has done some wonderful stuff over the past few years so I'm anxiously awaiting to see what his next move will be. After all, he did get 4449 from Portland to Michigan!

Rob Gardner

Tag it onto a regular scheduled Amtrak train, unannounced.

Or have it haul some real freight.

Let's disregard finding enough qualified crew members and the logistics of crew management.

Assuming Amtrak and/or BNSF even gives you the time of day after that wacky proposition, my dumb back-of-the-envelope calculation says you need to set up 30+ high-speed watering and refueling stops. With the right fuel and appropriate water treatment.

I've BEEN in Seligman, Arizona, where the locals still pay BNSF for the local water. And tasted the water. Ugh.

I'm sorry, "dinwitty," but it's comments like that which make railroads disregard railfans as loopy nut cases.

Um...it's not that loopy. Fantastically unlikely but don't forget that UP used to stick 8444 on the front of Amtrak trains in positioning moves. You are also presuming the engine must run straight through with the train. A more practical suggestion is that it's placed at the front of a train, run a couple hundred miles and then removed for servicing while the train continues without it. It then gets put on another train. Two or three stints like that a day. Only train delay if all goes well is coupling / uncoupling. You don't do this with hottest trains just in case.

I agree it will never happen but that would be a practical way to do it if they did though it doesn't generate any ticket revenue.

Steve

This may be a spectacularly stupid question. Which ten-wheeler was it that UP hauled on a flatcar during one of the early 1990s excursions? ISTR she was relatively small. I don't think 3751 would fit on that sort of arrangement, or that might be a solution. She *would* be too tall, wouldn't she?

I don't think a lot of railfans understand the lag time required, as was pointed out above. Vacation scheduling, ads in railfan magazines, PR in newspapers, printed materials--they all have necessary lead time. If all you can say is "we hope there'll be some steam engines there, honest" it doesn't make for an appealing brochure. If you wait until they're all on the property--which would indeed be the only almost 100 percent safe way to do it--you'd either have no time for promotion OR tie up an engine for months away from home, with all the mess that entails for her crew. Let's assume you did, indeed wait for everything to be there...and on opening day, one of the engines breaks some annoyingly rare part. Oops.

I've never forgotten the Steamtown grand opening when 1225 was steamed up and ready to leave, only to get the call that a tunnel clearance wasn't what anyone had on their records (doublestacking project had effectively raised a projecting catwalk to cylinder height.) It wasn't a problem for diesels, so no one had noted the change. Things can happen in a heartbeat, and most of them aren't good. Nothing in steam is guaranteed until you're actually riding behind the engine.

Remember the first trip 3751 made to Chicago involved multiple qualified former Santa Fe engineers,and I'm quite sure that while most of those engineers who made that trip are either too old or deceased for consideration,there are other more than qualified engineers and firemen who could make that run. She ran off some crazy milages,sometimes more than 400 miles a day! No one in the modern era has run a steam locomotive that far,that fast, on that many days in a row, than the 3751 has. There is only one way out of Southern California for the 3751, and that's on the BNSF. Now stranger things have happened, so let's just wait and see.