Up Crab Creek

After spending half of last Saturday following the Daylight up the Gorge I headed for BNSF’s Columbia River subdivision for several days.  The Columbia River sub lies between Wenatchee and Latah Jct. just west of Spokane.  The subdivision primarily follows Crab Creek from the Adrian area to just west of Edwall.  The creek provided the GN with a water level route and gentle curves between Wenatchee and Spokane.  Today, the BNSF takes advantage of this geography and engineering by routing much of its Seattle and Tacoma bound intermodal traffic over this line.

The most famous feature of this route is of course Trinidad hill.  Since that has been well covered elsewhere I’ll spare everyone and present some photos from places not regularly shown.

An eastbound Z train enters double track at Lamona.  The double track segment extends just over 20 miles from Lamona to Bluestem.

Back to single track east of Bluestem, S-TACLPC winds through an S curve as the track drops down grade to cross Crab Creek one last time.

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