(The following column by Phil Brown appeared on the Enid News website on November 14.)
ENID, Okla. — Trains, trains and more trains. Railroads always have been a big part of life in Enid, and they still are.
The lack of a railroad depot sparked a yearlong “war” between the residents of Enid on one side and the Rock Island Railroad and the residents of North Enid on the other side. The Rock Island refused to stop its trains in Enid because the depot was at North Enid.
It was a real “war” too, with shots fired at the Rock Island trains as they sped through Enid. Enid finally won after someone sawed through the wooden supports of a rail trestle southeast of Enid, wrecking a Rock Island freight train.
Later on, city officials forbidden by law to vote bonds to bring another railroad to Enid instead issued water bonds and used some of this money to entice a railroad to lay its track from Arkansas City through Enid. This later became the St. Louis to San Francisco, or Frisco, railroad.
In the 1940s and ’50s, the Rock Island ran four streamline diesel-electric passenger trains through Enid daily, traveling between Houston and Minneapolis, and the Frisco had limited local train service between Enid and Tulsa. All of Enid’s passenger train service ended in the 1960s.
It was reported in 1915 there were “27 mail trains” traveling through Enid daily. At that time Enid was served by the Rock Island, Santa Fe and the Frisco railroads.
Enid presently is served by Burlington-Northern Santa Fe Railway, Union Pacific and FarmRail. It is freight service only. There is no passenger train service in Enid. The UP operates over the old Rock Island tracks and BNSF over the old Frisco tracks, before joining up with the Santa Fe mainline on the other side of Avard.
If there were 27 trains chugging through Enid every day in 1915, when trains were just about the only way to haul freight and people, there must be that many, and maybe sometimes more, passing through Enid daily now.
Enid is a changeover point for BNSF freight train crews. They travel from Amarillo to Enid or from Tulsa to Enid, where the railroad is required to put a fresh crew on the train.
A train crew consists of a conductor and an engineer, and they both ride in the locomotive. Freight trains don’t have cabooses anymore.
In the early days, trains brought in everything a sprouting young city would need to build its homes and businesses, keep up its streets and sustain human life and livestock.
Today they still carry just about everything — much of it imports from Asian countries.
Those funny-looking enclosed freight cars you see on trains — the ones that have many little windows on them — are carrying automobiles, and those railroad flatcars loaded with big metal containers stacked two-high were probably off-loaded from a ship on the West Coast and are being transported across the U.S. by rail, where many of them once again will be loaded on ships headed for Europe.