Mail & Express Part II, page 2
Ogden, Utah July 3, 1969
Ogden, Utah July 3, 1969
For comparison: Above: promtotional booklet picture of the original 1936 City, which was powered by distillate-burning Winton engines. Below: UP's 1969 City of Everywhere.
Sadly, although I hoped to secure a sleeping space onJuly 4 for the westbound City of San Francisco to Oakland, but SP ran only one sleeper (click here for the complete set of my tickets), which really didn't matter, because I would have spent all of my time in the dome car, anyway.
I did get quite a floor show at Ogen by way of compensation. In the photos above and below, one of the all-time impressive trains in railroading, the combined City of LA/SF/Kansas City - more commonly known as the City of Everywhere - arrives a bit late at Ogden on the evening of July 3, 1969, with five - count 'em - E units. After about an hour of intensive switching, a relatively puny City of San Francisco, powered by a single SDP45, departed with me aboard.
An aside: I had arrived at Ogden via Greyhound and the "Jackson - Idaho Falls Stage Line" several hours prior to this event. I was feeling a little unsettled, because the latter company had forgotten to load my suitcase, even though there was only one other passenger on it's elderly, Pre-War Flxible Clipper (at a mid-route rest stop, the bus would not restart due to dead batteries, so the driver and I hooked a tow rope to an available mid-'50's limosine, which the other passenger used to pull-start the bus). Inside my suitcase was ten pounds of firecrackers - YIKES! At least the darn suitcase didn't blow during the two weeks that it took to finally find its way home - each morning I scanned the newspaper headlines for "Greyhound Bus Vaporizes in Nevada Desert "... I was on my way home from a short, abortive career as a cook's helper in Grand Teton National Park, where I had managed to dump a large pan of hot, baked cornish game hens, destined for consumption by the Supreme Court of the United States (Earl Warren & Co. - the John Birch Society should have awarded me a medal), onto a dirty kitchen floor in front of the head chef ("Don't worry kid! Pick 'em up and brush them off. Nobody'll know the difference.").
Anyway, during my wait for the City, I poked around the depot quite a bit (before a bull shooshed me back into the waiting room), and found that the express room was still alive and seemingly well. Boy, during pre-1968 holidays, the place really must have hummed with head end traffic.
Other Ogden Stuff
Above is Ogden's depot earlier in the afternoon - in the foreground is an older building which I believe served as the main station until constuction of Union Depot building (the brick building beyond). On the near side is a UP Rules Examiner Car. Behind me at the time of the photograph stood boiler-equipped GP-9 #297. Note the "Road of the Streamliners" on the cab side - I thought that this slogan had been discontiued on UP locos some ten years previous. My guess is that the unit was serving as backup power for the still-frequent UP trains through Ogden. A few years earlier, Geep 9's were standard power on the Yellowstone Special, summer only trains that ran from Pocotello to Victor Idaho, where a bus connection took tourists to Grand Teton and Yellowstone Parks.
Through the summer of 1965, the Yellowstone Specials ran combined with the Tri-Weekly Butte Special between Salt Lake City and Pocotello, then split away for its journey to West Yellowstone; Victor, Idaho in later years. Below, the Butte Special makes its 8:20 PM call on Ogden. After that, it was night.
I highly recommend Don Strack's OGDEN RAILS, Union Pacific’s Streamliners, a history of UP Streamliners and SP connecting trains, centered around Ogden.