I was on that excursion too. Seems like it was a joint effort between Central Coast NRHS and Pacific Northwest NRHS. It ran 31 years ago Labor Day Weekend...time flies.

The train was supposed to go to Bly. The reason it didn't was because five of the cars came in that morning on a delayed northbound Starlight. Amtrak 14 was about two hours late getting to Klamath Falls because of an electrical fire in the diner down near Mt. Hebron.

The OC&E only had one crew set up to work the train. Since it was a passenger train, it shouldn't have been too much trouble to get the varnish to Bly, run the power around the train, and return to Klamath in less than 12 hours. The track to Sycan was in decent shape, and good for 20-25 MPH. Beyond the junction for Sycan yard near Beatty, the OC&E track to Bly was strictly a 10 MPH proposition. As a guess, I would figure it would have taken the excursion about three hours to go from Klamath to Sycan, around four hours to go roundtrip from Sycan to Bly, and then three hours to get back to Klamath - roughly a ten hour trip.

The trouble was that no one told the OC&E that Amtrak was late. So, they went ahead and called their crew for the time the SP was supposed to deliver the five cars off No.14, if it had made Klamath on schedule. (Four additional cars had come down from Portland on No.11 the night before, and were already on the OC&E.) Since it was Labor Day weekend, it was very doubtful that sufficient OC&E operating employees could be found to dogcatch the train, if the original crew died before getting back to Klamath.

By the time SP delivered the five passenger cars off Amtrak to the OC&E interchange, the OC&E crew had already been on duty for a couple of hours. Going all the way to Bly was ruled out. However, the train did perform three great runbys. Weyco gave everyone on the train the run of Sycan Shop for a couple of hours. I would have preferred to have gone to Bly, but it was still quite a trip.