September 2014 Trip - 1

Hi, I was joined by friends Bill Kalkman, Dale Diacont and Stan Short on a 12 day trip to parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri from September 11 through September 22. The first and the last day of the trip were travel days basically.

Stan, Dale and I arrived in Kansas City, MO about 10:00 AM.  However, Bill did not arrive until 1:40 PM.  We picked him up at 2:00 PM and headed for Dodge City, Kansas, where we spent the night.

On the way we got a ho hum BNSF photo in cloudy weather (not included here) and Bill got a local train among some grain elevators.

The next morning we took a look around Dodge City, which is the eastern end of the Cimarron Valley (our target for the day), but nothing was happening. Therefore, we elected to head for Satanta, KS, the headquarters of the Cimarron Valley to see if we could get some information on operations for the day.  We found three out of service  GP30s, one of which is shown above at right, and an active GP30 switching.

Checking with the office we learned that the crew would soon be leaving for Ulysses (above) and that a crew would be leaving Dodge City about 1:00 PM to bring a train to Satanta.

We immediately returned to Dodge City and found the train just leaving at about 12:15 PM.  The above photo was taken from the US 400 overpass just southwest of town.

The area between Dodge City and Ensign has numerous timber pile trestles, two of which are shown above and below.

Every town along the route has at least one grain elevator.  Above and below are photos of the one at Ensign, the first town west of Dodge City.

Montezuma had two more grain elevators and

a new trestle west of town.

An original ATSF station sign still stood in Copeland just next to another grain elevator.

Our final photos were at Sublette which had at least five elevators, including the one shown above.

Thanks for looking.