Union Pacific’s Encina Hill

Come with us as we tour one of Union Pacific’s three helper grades in the Blue Mountains before the age of distributed power and see 24 hours of action on the UP’s main line to the Pacific Northwest. The traffic on this line has increased so much in the past 20 years that UP was planning to double track all of their Blue Mountain grades when this was filmed in May of 1994. Intermodal or “Z” trains, stack trains, long manifests, unit coal and grain trains – they are all here as we show the ear-splitting action on one of the three summits of the Blue Mountains – Encina Hill in northeast Oregon. See what the Nampa reduction is all about as UP tries to speed up operations on this busy line. Length = 65 minutes.