Thanks George. I guess I might know some of the story and vaguely recall the rest. Books, magazines, and my own notes and photos from the way back when should help fill in the blanks. The connector near Fish Lake, which shifted westbounds off of BN's ex-SP&S at a new switch called U.P. Jct. and led them onto the ex-NP at a new switch called Lakeside Jct. was built during 1986 and placed in service in 1987. The majority of the SP&S west (geographically southwest) of Fish Lake was eventually ripped up during the early 1990s.

What I did not realize until many years after that connector was put in place is that the original NP alignment used to loop through a curve in that area, just southwest of Queen Lucas Lake, that overlapped beyond the right of way where the SP&S and UP/MILW ended up being. Construction of the SP&S and UP forced NP to carve back several rock faces and shift its line slightly to the east.

As for the older connector between the SP&S at Scribner and NP at Marshall (or Marshall Jct. as it was known), the Ed Austin and Tom Dill book on the SP&S reminds us that when SP&S entered service between Spokane and Pasco in 1909, the NP used a cramped yard in downtown Spokane, and its nearest terminal/crew change points on either side were Kootenai, ID, and Sprague, WA. The last few miles of SP&S trackage between Scribner and Spokane (Fort Wright Jct. on the GN to be precise) didn't go into service until mid-1910, so for the first several months of SP&S operations their trains had to use the Scribner connector and ride NP between Marshall and Spokane. Plus, as noted in a previous post, there was a short period of NP trains using the SP&S between Scribner and Pasco, with NP crews handling those trains between Kootenai, ID, and the SP&S terminal at Lamont, WA. After NP opened its yard at Yardley/Parkwater in 1913, its trains stopped using the SP&S routing and crew change. SP&S trains alternated every ten years between using NP or GN terminals in Spokane.

Interesting operational note. In the 1950s, an SP&S "Scribner Turn" began shuttling cars between the NP at Yardley and the SP&S at Scribner. Well into the 1990s, BN and BNSF had locals that shuttled cars from either Yardley or Erie Street (Erie Street being the small yard east of the Amtrak depot) west to the short siding at Scribner, where a westbound grain train or manifest would later pick them up. Likewise, those same locals often pulled blocks of grain cars off the Palouse River & Coulee City's ex-NP P&L line at Marshall and shoved them up the connector to Scribner for pick-up by a westbound.

In recent years, the short siding at Scribner has been used mainly for storage of empty freight cars but occasionally holds MofW equipment when track projects are happening in the canyon. The Scribner-Marshall connector, however, sees daily use by UP trains coming into Spokane from Hinkle, by locals, and by occasional westbounds (including Amtrak 27) that have enough power to pull the Low Side (ex-NP) from Empire to Marshall and up the connector to get around slower or stopped trains on the High Side (ex-SP&S). That Low Side detour for westbounds more commonly takes them straight to Lakeside Jct., but if there's something in their way between Marshall and Lakeside Jct., or if the detouring train is a UP, then it's up the connector they must go.