BNSF at Perry, Oklahoma Blu-Ray

Perry, a county seat town in north-central Oklahoma, sixty-three miles north of Oklahoma City, is in a unique position on the sprawling BNSF system.  (Second commentary)  There, two important main lines run side by side through this town of 5100 residents – the north-south former Santa Fe Kansas City to Fort Worth and Galveston line  and the east-west former Saint Louis San Francisco or Frisco and later Burlington Northern Tulsa to Avard line.  Avard is ninety-three miles west of Perry where it connects with the BNSF Chicago to California Transcon and Tulsa is eighty-three miles east of Perry.  The two lines cross at Black Bear, six miles northeast of Perry.   After the BNSF merger connecting tracks were installed at Black Bear and Perry in order to allow westbounds from the hump classification yard in Tulsa to head south onto the former Santa Fe main at Black Bear and vice-versa.  The former Santa Fe line through Perry, BNSF’s present day Red Rock subdivision, has been an important trunk line since shortly after the Santa Fe took over the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe in December of 1886 and opened a through route between Kansas City and Galveston.  Until 1973 the former Frisco line through Perry was a sleepy branch line with a train a day between Tulsa and junction of two branch lines and some of the largest terminal elevators in the wheat belt at Enid, thirty five miles west of Perry.  Then in 1973 the Santa Fe and Frisco moved their interchange point for transcontinental traffic from Floydada in the Texas Panhandle to Avard.  At that time heavier rail was installed and several sidings lengthened but the Avard branch or Avard subdivision as it is known today didn’t really come into its own until after the merger of the Santa Fe and Burlington Northern to form BNSF in 1995.   This program shows over twenty-four hours of action at Perry in April of 2016.  Length = 1 hour, 52 minutes.  This program can be watched with ot without narration.