As luck would have it, the engineer on the West Local needed to throttle up a notch just as the West Local approached the camera! 10-15 years ago, the West Local would sometimes draw four geeps for power because the train could be 30-50 cars long. This was when Rocky Flats was still in its cleanup phase and Mesa Oil was still located west of Leyden. Now, however, the Rocky Flats cleanup project has long since been completed and Mesa Oil has moved, leaving only the aggregate plant at the north end of the Rocky Spur as the sole customer for the West Local. So why send three units to handle a single car? This same power is used on the South Local, which runs down to Sedalia on the Joint Line on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is easier to just leave the power MU'd together for the trip west on Wednesday's.
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