It's another quiet morning in Caprock, Texas.
The Chief Dispatcher is deadheading two crews to Clovis and has called a WCL (waycar light "caboose hop"), which has pulled up to the depot to receive a numbered clearance card and train orders. The Conductor and Head End Brakeman will jog out of the depot to their respective ends of the little train and they will sprint over to Clovis as fast as possible. Waiting in the clear on the Yard Auxilliary Lead is the Southern Pacific branch line job for Tucumcari. This train runs three times weekly by trackage rights secured last year. SP built a branch line to Abilene to tap into ranch country for livestock and cotton business, but a large and critical bridge was lost during the monsoon season in 1950. Trackage rights were secured on Santa Fe from Dickens to Amarillo, and the job lays over for the night in both directions at Caprock. The Train Dispatcher is not going to have his deadheading crews poking along behind the SP job, with its slow Baldwin-Westinghouse AS-616, so the cab hop is going to run first, and the SP job will never even see a yellow block signal after they get going.
Meanwhile, around the corner, Wallace White, the regular Engineer on the West Texas Express, is following his regular morning ritual of eating biscuits and gravy at the Y'All Come Cafe, before going on duty at 9:00. He's in for a surprise today, though. Attired in his regular dress of slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt, so that everyone is reminded that he holds the august position of regular passenger Engineer, he will need to dash home and change clothes. Tyler Burleson, the Call Boy, is trotting down the sidewalk toward the cafe to give Wallace the news that, instead of his little 4-car train and regular E8m diesel, he will be getting a steam engine and the detouring southern section of the Grand Canyon, which will assume the schedule and run as First No. 93, the first section of the West Texas Express on the regular timetable schedule. Even as this happens, Extra 2925 East is dropping off the cap rock -- the geologic southern end of the Great Plains -- in the charge of a passenger-qualified freight crew, and will make its way through rolling country to Abilene, where it will run over the Texas and Pacific to Fort Worth, regain Santa Fe rails and return to the regular route at Malvern, Kansas. The railroad is supremely prepared for unusual events such as this, and even though there was not time to deadhead a uniformed passenger crew to Clovis to man the Grand Canyon, the railroad will move the train all the way to Chicago without unusual added delay, and the passengers will eat complimentary Fred Harvey meals in the dining car.
Life in Caprock, Texas, goes on at a typically low-key pace, though, and 5 minutes after the departure of the passenger train you would never be able to guess that anything unusual had happened.
