E Wrote:
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> IIRC, the runaway did not occur at the same time
> 4449 was on the territory. Rather, it occured
> sometime after 4449 was on another part of the
> system, well away from the territory of the RFE(s)
> assigned to the Pass.

The 4449 had been in Southern California in early May 1989 for the 50th anniversary of LAUPT. The side-by-side run of the 4449 and 844 up Cajon occurred on May 8th, then it made a rather leisurely trip up the Valley to Sacramento and the Bay Area before returning home to Portland. While the 4449 did indeed attract (maybe require is a better term) a lot of management attention, this was at the height of the Anshutz Era, and the 4449 was important to him, thus, any good manager made it important to himself, too, as a matter of self-preservation. Plus, there were a lot more local managers then - they weren't called "managers" back then. Rather, they were Company Officers. "Managers" was a term the UP brought when them.

I'm not sure that blaming the trona train runaway on management's distraction with the 4449 is entirely credible. There were a lot of factors that led up to the MJLBP-11's runaway, which happened on the morning of May 12th. In my post about the engineer's qualifications (above), there's a link to a short article that pretty well explains the chain of events.