noise."Chapter Notes: Puget Sound (Destination Unknown) · 2:50am Feb 4th, 2022
One more tunnel, this one short, and then an open expanse of saltwater! Is it the Pacific?
Sadly not, but it’s close to the Pacific. Sweetsong’s nearly reached the ocean.
Special thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for pre-reading!
Equine Laundry? Who knew equines had enough blankets and whatnot to warrant a specific laundry? And in Snohomish, of all places.
They’re real, and they have a website. And they are in fact right next to the tracks.
They do offer more than just equine laundry; they offer farrier products and tools, clipper blade sharpening, leather repair, and canine laundry as well.
In the US, around 2008 or so, lots of semi-trailers got side skirting added to help with fuel economy. making it easier to hide underneath a trailer if one so desired. (I do not recommend trying this in any circumstance.)
For various reasons which we won’t get into here (because it’s not really story-related) the idea of hauling trailers on trains has been appealing nearly as long as there have been trailers and trains to haul them. Circuses traditionally moved this way; all the wagons were loaded onto special flatcars, and in fact the practice of driving the length of the train with short ramp bridges between railcars is called ‘circus-style’ loading.
It’s time-consuming to load and unload, and you’re always carrying equipment you don’t need, whether it’s the running gear of the truck trailer or the deck of the flatcar. One design that got around that was the spine car—it had the center ‘spine’ only on one end, and the other end was wider; that was where the wheels of the truck trailer could rest. Most, if not all of these cars have folding-down fifth-wheel plates and clips so they can also carry cargo containers. Many of them are in three- or five-car sets; since the load is light (for a railroad car), they can share wheels in the middle.
This video shows a train of spine cars passing by, including some trailers with skirts. Notice also that the second locomotive, an ex-Union Pacific locomotive, has two engine room doors open for some reason. If you watch through, you’ll also see containers on spine cars, and two short trailers on at least one car.
In theory, such a car with a trailer with side-skirts on it would give Sweetsong decent visibility, and she would be almost impossible to see if she sat back between the axles of the truck. In practice, I imagine that would be a very uncomfortable ride and probably dangerous as well, since the wide part of the car can offer no protection whatsoever for anything coming up between the rails.
According to one source, the Everett Tunnel (or Tunnel 16) was built in 1910; another source says it was 1901. It’s approximately 2500 feet long. There is another tunnel under Seattle as well that the Great Northern built. I have no idea why they built the Everett Tunnel. It seems a really odd place to be worried about grade separation.
What is interesting (to me, at least) is if you look at it on Google Maps, you’ll see that the eastern portal is just east of Oakes Ave, and if you look on the satellite view, you’ll see a white Chevy box truck parked with its nose just over the tracks.
If you put the little street view guy down at the front of that truck, looking over the tracks, then click to the Aug 2018 Street View, you’ll see that very same truck in that very same parking spot.*
Some of you might remember in Silver Glow’s Journal how she saw paired flatcars with a weird structure on one end and a little shed on the opposite end of the other flatcar, and she couldn’t figure out what those were.
I don’t remember if I ever told people who asked in the comments (I might not have), but now you know what they’re for:
The reason they’re shipped by rail is that Spirit Aerosystems builds the fuselages in Wichita, KS, and the aircraft are assembled in Boeing’s factory in Renton, WA. While they could be transported by truck, that’s an oversided load with lots of permits needed, and only one fuselage can go per truck. Likewise, they’re small enough to be carried (one-by-one) inside a bigger cargo aircraft, but that’s expensive.
On the other hand, it’s not an oversized load for the railroad, and they can carry more than one at a time. Simpleflying reports that they deliver 35/month, and that over 10,000 B737s have been delivered to the factory this way. So next time you’re on a 737, think for a moment that before it could fly, it took the train.
The reason that the flatcars are paired is that the fuselage is too long for one car, so the second serves as an idler car, which the tail overhangs.
Sweetsong disembarked at the Buddy Shoreline Walk, which is an extension of the Richmond Beach Saltwater Park (the park proper is inland of the tracks, and has a bridge over to the shoreline walk).
From when it hits Puget Sound west of Everett, the BNSF runs along the coast near enough to practically be in the water all the way down to Salmon Bay, where it goes inland. Words alone aren’t enough to describe it, so here’s a video:
Be forewarned, it’s an hour long. Better open it in a second window 
They pass by the Buddy Shoreline Walk at about the 32-minute mark.
Now seems like a good time for this, since Sweetsong has made much of her cross-country journey.
The song is about a cross-country journey on the Canadian Pacific, which runs from coast-to-coast in Canada.
You might notice at the beginning of the song, he mentions riding their ocean liner . . . Canadian Pacific did used to have fleets of ships, both cargo and passenger. In fact, the infamous Empress of Ireland was a CP ship.
They sold their passenger fleet in the 70s, due to competition from airlines. One of those competing airlines was Canadian Pacific Air Lines, and you’ll never guess who owned that airline.
CP sold off their airline business in 1987, and their cargo ship fleet in 2005.
*When I was doing the research for this chapter (last year sometime),** the google images streetview was the one from 2018, and I thought it was interesting that it was the first time where I’d seen the same vehicle, in the same parking space, on both the overhead and the street view. Makes sense, since it’s (I presume) a delivery truck for that business.
Canadian Pacific also operated a fleet of passenger ships on the Great Lakes. Disturbingly, all but one of the ships on the Wikipedia have an end-of-service date marked ‘loss’ rather than ‘retired’ or ‘scrapped’ or ‘sold.’ The only one that didn’t sink or founder (Wikipedia doesn’t have articles on most of them) is the SS Keewatin, which is still around as a museum ship. Interestingly, she also served as a set for a film about her infamous cousin, the Empress of Ireland.
Also interesting is the SS Athabasca, which, according to Wikipedia, had her name misspelled on the shipping register from 1883-1910.
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**I don’t know when I started on Destination Unknown, but the gDoc was created in January 2021, and the story itself was created on FimFiction between Mareton and Driftfield and Saturday (Jan 2021/Feb 2021), and the original draft would have been nearly complete by September 2021.
Market forces are strange things. They spend millions building road rail interchanges, then even as the roads get more congested, making deliveries more expensive and irregular, they sell the interchanges for cinemas and turn the lines into housing. Which need even more deliveries they have now less capacity to service.
Notice how they keep going on about driverless cars and virtual road trains?
For a while the Google map view of my house had my truck parked there, and the Google map view of my friend’s house also had my truck parked there
And now gotten through this chapter and blog post too. Thank you for writing. :)
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Yeah, it’s weird, and how it works is always counterintuitive . . . for example, adding capacity rarely improves throughput, but sometimes taking it away does.
I’ll believe it when I see it; ordinary drivers are dumb, but in many ways computers are dumber.
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While I have enough vehicles that the streetview of my house has some of them in the driveway (and the streetview and satellite view of my work also have one of my vehicles), my claim to fame as that goes is an NPR special that’s got my car sitting in front of a house where we were shooting a movie.
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You’re welcome!