Pretty much everyone in the railfan community who's been around me for any length of time knows that I grew up along the Chicago North Western's Harvard Subdivision. Up until the 1980's, this was still the secondary mainline between Chicago and the Twin Cities via Madison and other exciting points like Evansville and Wyeville.One person or another in my immediate and extended family has lived at almost every station stop between the Chicago City Limits and Harvard, Illinois. If you ever wondered why I chose that to model, there's the reason.
Just north of Madison on that line is the Baraboo syncline, a geological wonderland. This is where the Ice Age ended -- glaciers pushing their way south created much of the features that make up the modern day Wisconsin Dells, and then stopped. The syncline is also home to 1.65 billion year old Baraboo quartzite, which has a very distinctive purple-pink color.
The CNW, often regarded as the Cheap and Nothing Wasted, discovered that quartzite made for excellent ballast, much better than the pit gravel that other roads like the Milwaukee Road often used... For decades, they owned and operate their own quarry in the aptly named Rock Springs, WI, that produced their distinctive pink ballast and became known forever as Pink Lady.
Pink Lady was used systemwide, from Chicago to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and all the way to the end of the line in Lander, WY. Because they owned the quarry, it made sense since moving it at cost was still cheaper than buying it somewhere else.
Whenever I saw it, even halfway across the country, I felt at home.
When CNW merged with the UP in 1995, I never really heard if the Rock Springs quarry was kept in-house, or if it was sold off, but Pink Lady was still being loaded there as recently as 2007 and used regionally.And then in 2008, the Baraboo River had epic flooding, which knocked out the bridge to the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in nearby North Freedom, and also managed to flood the Rock Springs area, including the quarry. It closed down to rail loading permanently.
For the next 15 years, as I traveled up and down US-14 and occasionally on the Harvard Sub to get to and from downtown Chicago, Pink Lady was always there, like a well worn comfortable pair of boots.
Until last week.
While driving between errands, it happened.There was
Grey? Here?
For years I lived in in Arizona and Texas, so grey ballast was not new to me. It was really the norm. As I watched the UP extend double track along the Gila Sub between Tucson and Maricopa, there was no shortage of new grey ballast being laid, and replacing older ballast was no longer able to be undercut & cleaned.
Grey worked. It fit the desert environment. It even matched the color of the UP's locomotives and grain hoppers... And since I didn't grow up with the Southern Pacific, I didn't think twice about the black and brown ballast that was being replaced.
But not here in Illinois.No.
It looks wrong. Out of place. Unthinkable. Sacrilege.
But to be fair, I knew this day would eventually come.
I just wasn't ready for it this week.
Ah well.
Long live Pink Lady. You had a great run.
I know BNSF got ballast in the region from a quarry in St. Cloud, MN, and apparently KCS did, too, since I saw quite a few ballast trains with their power. That quarry may have closed recently