Grand Canyon Railway

Williams – Grand Canyon
Route length:	102.6 km
Gauge :	1435 mm ( standard gauge )
Maximum slope :	30  ‰
Legend from Phoenix Operating limit BNSF Railway / GCRY 0 Williams Track triangle 1.1 Interstate 40 Depot 2.0 from Los Angeles Williams Junction to Kansas 10.5 Pitt until 1942 11.3 Connection to Cinder Pit Wye until around 1924 14.5 Red Lake until around 1956 23.8 Bly until 1941 29.3 Mile Post 18 from 1941 to 1974 33.0 Quivero until 1908: "Prado" 46.7 Valle 60.7 Willaha 70.5 Woodin 72.3 Anita gave up in 1972 Connection of copper mines 80.5 Hopi gave up in 1942 83.7 Imbleau to 2001: Apex Conn. Saginaw & Manister Lumber Co. (42 km) 92.1 Coconino until around 1954 96.4 National park boundary "Grand Canyon" Track triangle 102.6 Grand Canyon originally: Grand Cañon

The Grand Canyon Railway ( AAR reporting mark: GCRY) is a US-American railroad company that operates the nearly 103-kilometer standard-gauge railway line from Williams to Grand Canyon Village on the southern edge of the Grand Canyon in the US state of Arizona .

history

Santa Fe

Opening train in 1901

The route followed both the destination to Anita the Convention therein copper - mines to be connected to the railway network, as well as the tourist to tap potential of the Grand Canyon. The canyon has been developed as a tourist destination since around 1880 and was initially only accessible by stagecoach from Flagstaff in an eleven hour drive. Local interests sought to attract the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT & SF) to the project. In 1897 the Santa Fe and Grand Canyon Railroad Company was founded, and construction of the line began in 1899.

The Santa Fe and Grand Canyon Railroad Company was taken over by AT & SF in 1899, which completed the construction of the line and began operations here on September 17, 1901. At peak times, two pairs of trains scheduled and many perverse daily special trains in passenger traffic on the route. In addition, there was freight traffic for the adjacent mines, the timber industry and the cattle farms along the route.

In order to promote traffic on the route, AT & SF also built a larger scale tourist infrastructure on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, including the top hotel there, the El Tovar . The architect Mary Colter was commissioned several times . In 1904 the management of these facilities was transferred to the hotel and catering company of Fred Harvey .

In 1910, the entrance building in Grand Canyon Village , which still exists today, was built in block construction. It replaced a simple barrack that previously served as a reception building. The building from 1910 is now a listed building under federal law . It is said to be the last of a block-type terminal station that is still in operation in the United States today. The station originally had six platform tracks . Two of them are still in working order today. The historic station building in Williams dates back to 1908.

On July 29, 1916, after a heavy storm at kilometer 58 (milepost 36), a bridge over the Miller Wash gave way when it was passed by a passenger train . The stoker was trapped between the locomotive and the tender and died, the engine driver was injured. As he had only driven at walking pace as a precaution, the passengers were unharmed.

By 1926, all of the drinking water for Grand Canyon Village was transported by rail.

A number of US presidents, show greats and also King Paul and Queen Frederike of Greece traveled to the Grand Canyon by train.

With the increasing importance of private transport, the volume of transport on the route decreased. The last passenger train left Grand Canyon Village on June 30, 1968. Its locomotive also pulled a baggage car and a passenger car. The train carried three more travelers . In 1969 all traffic to Grand Canyon Village was stopped. Freight traffic was carried out on the section further south until 1974, then the line was closed.

Grand Canyon Railway

In 1989 the Grand Canyon Railway took over the route. This was the fourth attempt to bring the line back into service. The Grand Canyon Railway had been transferred to the entrepreneurial couple Max and Thelma Biegert for liquidation after one of their creditors had to file for bankruptcy and his loan was secured by a mortgage on the railway in favor of the Biegerts. They then joined the project themselves. They first invested a sum of $ 15 million to get the line back in working order and to purchase a basic set of vehicles . Already on September 17, 1989 - exactly 88 years after the first route was opened - the route was inaugurated again.

Grand Canyon Railway in Williams, Arizona

In 2006 Max and Thelma Biegert sold the GCRy for an undisclosed sum to Xanterra Parks and Resorts , a company that provides services in and around US national parks. The GCRy then had annual revenues of $ 40 million and 480 employees. Xanterra emerged from the company of Fred Harvey , who for the first time provided acceptable food and accommodation along the railroads in the “Wild West” in the 19th century. Xanterra was bought by Philip Anschutz in 2008 .

business

route

Regular train, autumn 2014

The non-electrified route begins at Williams Station . From here there is a track connection to the Williams Junction – Phoenix , AZ line. The Grand Canyon Railway runs from Williams northward as far as Grand Canyon Village , where she in a terminal station ends only about 100 meters distance from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The route protection consists of a restricted run (there is always only one train on the route). There is a general maximum speed of 40 mph (approx. 65 km / h) on the route and 25 mph (40 km / h) within the national park. Therefore, the journey time of the train for the slightly more than 100 km is 2 ¼ hours.

vehicles

Steam locomotives 29 and 4960 at Grand Canyon train station

EMD F40PH series diesel-electric locomotive in Grand Canyon Village

The Grand Canyon Railway operates steam locomotives :

• No. 29, a Consolidation , 1D tank locomotive built in 1906 by the American Locomotive Company .
• No. 539, a Mikado , a 1D1 tank locomotive, currently not operational. It is parked on the platform in the Williams train station.
• No. 4960, another Mikado built and operational by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1923. It is heated with vegetable oil fuel .

Their diesel locomotives include 14 ALCO FPA-4 locomotives, both end units with a driver's cab and medium-sized units without a driver's cab. The GCRy is the only railway that still has the option to haul trains with ALCO FPA-4 locomotives in quadruple traction (end unit / 2 middle units / end unit). Next three were EMD F40PH of Amtrak acquired by Electro-Motive Diesel / General Motors were built from 1977 to 1979. This is supplemented by an EMD GP7 , No. 2134.

The passenger cars consist of two groups: On the one hand, 17 seated cars from the year of construction 1923 were acquired and refurbished by Southern Pacific Lines , some of which had been in local traffic on the San Jose - San Francisco route for over 60 years . On the other hand, the vehicle fleet consists of long-distance vehicles from the 1940s to 1960s, mostly built by Budd . The latter are predominantly used in regular GCRy traffic today.

traffic

Williams station building

Grand Canyon train station

The Grand Canyon Railway operates scheduled and daily traffic on the route year round - except at Christmas. As a rule, one pair of trains per day leaves Williams in the morning and Grand Canyon Village in the afternoon. In the main season, another pair of trains can come along if necessary. During the Christmas season, a polar express is run for children on the southern section , which brings them to Santa Claus at the “ North Pole ”, a city of scenery built along the route. This transports around 90,000 passengers per season.

In the summer, steam locomotives are also used on certain days that are announced in advance in the annual timetable, but diesel locomotives are normally used today. Until 2008, the steam locomotives were harnessed to all regular trains in the high season. According to the GCRy, this was given up because of the high greenhouse gas emissions compared to diesel traction . However, economic considerations seem to have played a role: when the regular steam operation was discontinued, 20 employees were laid off.

Traffic is geared towards the American audience, for whom a train ride in itself is a rare occurrence. The whole thing is dramatized by a Wild West shooting before the train leaves Williams and a "railroad robbery" on the return journey. Food and live music will be provided during the journey.

Six booking classes are offered . The price for the return ticket including reserved seat is (2014) between $ 62 (50 euros ) and $ 209 (165 euros). 225,000 passengers use the trains every year, more than 2 million since it was restarted. In 2006 there were even 240,000.

It is estimated that the Grand Canyon Railway will reduce car traffic in the national park by approximately 50,000 vehicles per year.

Worth knowing

• A bus to be booked in advance ran between Williams and Williams Junction stations until December 31, 2017 - meeting point is a Grand Canyon Railway hotel near the Grand Canyon Railway station - to connect to the only long-distance train that stops here, the Southwest Chief (Los Angeles – Williams – Albuquerque – Chicago), in both directions. The Williams Junction train station in its current form is / was not open to the public as it has no infrastructure whatsoever in the middle of the forest. In 2017, the Grand Canyon Railway announced that it would no longer operate the bus because the hotel operations were too severely impaired by passengers waiting at night - trains in the USA have sometimes been delayed considerably. As a result, the Amtrak railway company decided to close the Williams Junction stop and to allow passengers to get on and off with a shuttle bus in Flagstaff, more than fifty kilometers away .

• The entire railway line is now a listed building under federal law.
• The Grand Canyon National Park is the only one in the USA with its own rail connection.

literature

• NN: Grand Canyon Railway. In: Oh, Ranger. Grand Canyon National Park. Your Complete Guide to the Parks 2014/2015, p. 14.
• NN: History of The Train .
• NN: Meet the Fleet - GCR's Diesel Locomotives. In: Grand Canyon Railway's Territorial Times. P. 21.
• NN: Meet the Fleet - GCR's Steam Locomotives. In: Grand Canyon Railway's Territorial Times. P. 23.
• NN: Return to the Old West via the Grand Canyon Railway. In: Grand Canyon Railway's Territorial Times. P. 1, 6, no year
• Al Richmond, Marc Pearsall: The Grand Canyon Railway: Sixty Years in Color . 2007, ISBN 0-933269-11-0 .
• Al Richmond: Rails to the Rim. Milepost Guide To The Grand Canyon Railway . 2007, ISBN 0-933269-32-3 .
• Al Richmond: The Story of the Grand Canyon Railway. Cowboys, Miners, Presidents & Kings. The Story of the Grand Canyon Railway. ISBN 0-933269-02-1 .
• Howard Sheldon: Grand Canyon Railway .
• NN: Grand Canyon Railway. In the rolling railway museum to the "Great Gorge" . In: Klaus Viedebantt u. a .: Around the world on rails. The 55 best journeys by train . 2nd edition Bruckmann 2016. ISBN 978-3-7654-6793-6 , pp. 100f.

Web links

Commons : Grand Canyon Railway  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

• Official website ( English )
• bahninfo.de German-language information on www.bahninfo.de

Remarks

1. ↑ Not to be confused with the station Williams Junction until 31 December 2017 stop of Amtrak -Zuges Southwest Chief in Williams, AZ.

Individual evidence

1. ^ According to Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 29ff.
2. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 50f.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} NN: History of The Train .
4. ^ ^{A b c} Howard Sheldon: Grand Canyon Railway
5. ↑ See: Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 111.
6. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 58.
7. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 46.
8. ↑ NN: Return. P. 1; Al Richmond: The Story of the Grand Canyon Railway .
9. ↑ NN: Return. P. 1.
10. ^ NN: History of The Train ; NN: Return. P. 6.
11. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 114ff.
12. ↑ ^{a b c d} NN: Meet the Fleet - GCR's Steam Locomotives .
13. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. Figure caption for p. 24b.
14. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 117.
15. ^ Richmond: Rails to the Rim. P. 96ff, 119; NN: Grand Canyon Railway ; NN: About The Passenger Rail Cars. In: Grand Canyon Railway's Territorial Times, p. 27.
16. ^ NN: Grand Canyon Railway .
17. ^ NN: Grand Canyon Railway .
18. ↑ NN: Marshal Good More keeps Wild West outlaws at bay. In: Grand Canyon Railway's Territorial Times, p. 24.
19. ↑ Ticket prices .
20. ↑ NN: Return. P. 6.
21. ^ NN: History of The Train .
22. ↑ Wendy Howell: Grand Canyon Railway to discontinue Amtrak shuttle service . In: Williams News , September 26, 2017. Retrieved November 24, 2017. 
23. ↑ Heading to Grand Canyon? Well-traveled train station closes . In: The Arizona Republic , January 4, 2018.