Trip & Excursion Information The SBRHS is at any given time going through the process of planning and or arranging for trips using Santa Fe 3751. It can take up to 3 years to arrange long cross country trips that utilize multiple railroads and carry passengers. For trips without passengers like the organizations recent trip to San Pedro to kick off it's Educational Outreach Program it can take substantially less time to gain the needed permission, support, insurance and equipment.
One of the issues that we confront on a regular basis here in southern California when we plan for an event or operation is the massive volumes of rail traffic coming and going in the basin - and while something we run by Metrolink may be ok, the BNSF may have valid issues about it, or visa versa. While we are frustrated sometimes by this and other difficulties we fully understand and continue to work directly with Amtrak, Metrolink, the BNSF and occasionally the UP to gain acess to the rails to use the 3751 in a positive way to educate and promote rail safety as well as carry passengers.
Evidence of this came in a recent conversation with the BNSF when we were asking about getting into the central valley of California to perform another Educational Outreach Program in Kern County. The locomotive would need to use Cajon pass and of course Tehachapi pass to get to Kern County, the representative of the BNSF informed us that they really didn't want to entertain any movements of the 3751 that involved Cajon pass until the triple tracking of the pass was complete sometime in 2006. Rail traffic levels are expected to continue increasing in and out of Los Angeles and the BNSF already has plans on the tables to quadruple track the pass in the future.
Another issue is the industry wide insurance crunch which has at times prevented us from acquiring the various insurance policies required by host railroads. If this isn't enough we also experience difficulties in finding equipment appropriate for passengers and excursions that will meet todays tough requirements for hauling passengers. There are also inspections of the locomotive, inspections of the passenger cars, inspections of track that the 3751 will traverse (especially locations where the engine must be turned), and numerous other hurdles we must get past before we light off the boiler.
One of the most important issues we deal with as an organization is the business side of running a trip, with or without passengers. Equipment, insurance, protection locomotives, security, crews, water, fuel and the countless other details all cost money. We have a saying in the SBRHS, "If it doesn't make money, we don't go." In the case of our Educational Outreach Programs we have to acquire funding from local businesses, grants, or corporations to make the trip work, or in the case of hauling passengers all the expenses are carried by 300-500 tickets sold for that trip.
In order for a trip to be a 'go' all of the issues must be worked out, if they aren't, we don't go. That's a pretty hard reality if we have spent 2 years working everything else out, and we are only missing one of the 3 or 4 insurance policies we need to operate on railroad XYZ, or we can't sell enough tickets to break even on a trip. While we want to run the engine whenever we can, we have a completely different set of operating issues to deal with than any other organization operating big steam - and they are specific to the southern California area. No one in this industry has the same problems to overcome that we do here in the basin, not the 4449, not the 261, not the 700, not the 844 or 3985 - and definitely not any of the tourist railroads that sprinkle our nation.
We want you to know that we are always working on operations, but the tough reality of operating in southern California is that 95-99% of the trips that pass through the hands of our planning committee never make it to the depot to load passengers - for any one of the reasons explained above.
For the casual rail enthusiast it may look pretty simple to just get on the train and go, but there are miles and miles of meetings, paperwork, working out the math, more meetings, inspections, contracts, questions and more meetings before anything can roll. This is the reason that we don't talk about any possible operations before they are set in stone.
