My calendar for December, 2020

Another train-load of Bakken crude descends The Hill. (Photo by Jack Hughes.)

—Here it comes! Another train-load of Bakken crude-oil comes down the mountain for east-coast oil refineries.
My brother took this picture five years ago on my birthday in 2015. The train is approaching the 24th St. overpass in Altoona over Pennsy’s old Slope interlocking.
Slope used to have a tower, but now it’s operated remotely from Pittsburgh.
Slope is Altoona’s yard entrance, and long-ago Pennsy founded Altoona because that’s the foot of their grade over Allegheny front.
In the early 1800s, Allegheny Mountain was the barrier to trade across PA with the newly opened Midwest.
Philadelphia and Baltimore worried New York City might become this nation’s primary ocean port. And it did, thanks to New York’s Erie Canal.
Philadelphia and Baltimore had Allegheny Mountain to cross — it didn’t cross New York State.
Now that our economy is so tied to burning petroleum, we look for other crude-oil sources. Saudi Arabia and Venezuela come to mind.
But capitalists found they could frack crude-oil from the Bakken Shale Play under Eastern Montana and Western North Dakota. Crude-oil could also be extracted from tar-sands in Canada.
Viola! A crude-oil supply other than dictatorships and the tempestuous Middle-East.
Pipeline capacity was inadequate, so enter railroad unit oil trains.
The train pictured is all tankcars (“oil cans”) except for the idler between the tankcars and locomotives.
My guess is this photograph is a “shaddup-and-shoot.”
Here comes one down The Hill, so my brother leaps to the other side of the bridge and shoots.
Being backlit the light is all wrong. My brother prefers lighting the front of the engine. Looking east into Altoony would be okay by this time of day.
Nevertheless, this is how railroading became. Hundreds of tankcars, and only tankcars. A unit-train of nothing but tankcars.
Back-and-forth they go: empty out to the Bakken oil fields, then loaded back to the east coast. —Or Gulf Coast, or southern Californy, or wherever.

• The “idler” is a single unused freight-car behind the locomotives and ahead of the tankcars, to keep the tankcars from rolling into the locomotives if the train derails or wrecks. A unit oil-train has a single idler at each end.