05) Operations

The A&SE was a rather simple railroad to operate. From the very beginning a single mixed train pulled by 4-4-0 #1, left Bisbee every morning, usually at 7am, Monday through Saturday. The railroad did not operate on Sundays due to the owner's religious convictions.

The September 1889 issue of The Official Railway Guide: North AmericanFreight Service Edition shows that the morning train would leave Bisbee at 7:00am, arriving at Fairbank at 9:30am.

After 2 ½ hours given to servicing the locomotive & switching out cars at the interchange and readying the train for the return trip, departure was 12:00pm with the train arriving back at Bisbee at 2:30pm. It's interesting that the trains were operated at the same speed, 14.5 mph, in both directions up and down the road.

This is the first timetable for the Arizona & South Eastern

and shows the date of the official opening date of the railroad, February 1st, 1889.

Note that the name "South-Eastern" is now hyphenated.

In the beginning most scheduled trains averaged 5 or 6 cars in length, and that always included one or both of the line's coaches. That's not bad considering #1 was supposedly an obsolete, 32 year old 4-4-0 that spent the next 12+ years in service descending and climbing back to Bisbee on a grade as great as 2 ½%!

Even early on it was found that extra train movements on the round trip to Fairbank were often necessary. However, the road never changed from this one publicly scheduled train.

While one scheduled train was all the railroad needed, that doesn't mean the timetable never changed. The timetable from March, 1890 shows the the train leaving Bisbee at 7am, but now arriving at Fairbank at 9am and then heading back up at 10am and arriving at 12:30pm. This shows an increase in downhill speed to average 18 mph heading down to Fairbank, but keeping the original average speed of 14.5mph back up to Bisbee.

The November 1892 edition shows that the train was now leaving Bisbee at 6:20am and arriving at Fairbank at 8:15am. The train then departed for Bisbee at 9:30am, arriving there at 12:00pm. This earlier departure time may have been to allow for Number 1 to pull an extra section to Fairbank in the afternoon.

All timetables I have found specify Pacific Time. I have also seen “not city time” cited occasionally as well. This no doubt was to alert passengers that the railroad used “Railroad Time” instead of “local time” which was literally based on noon as measured by a sundial!

As a comparison to the first published timetable above, here is the A&SE timetable

from the November, 1897 Official Railway Guide North American Freight Service.

Throughout its history the A&SE only owned the handful of cars listed on February 1^st, 1889 roster. It purchased 2 or 3 more flat cars and two additional box cars later in the 1890's but that is the full extent of it's rolling stock. The vast majority of loaded and empty movements were interchange cars.

As can be expected, #2, the new 2-6-0 Baldwin spent most of its time in and around Bisbee switching out mine spurs, feeding cars loaded with coal and coke to the smelter and making and breaking up trains to and from Fairbank for interchange with the New Mexico & Arizona, and then the Southern Pacific at Benson.

The railroad ledgers reveal a bit more about how busy the road was and how it grew during it's second and third years of operation:

June 30^th, Fiscal Year 1891 shows 31,399 Revenue Tons carried and the following fiscal year, 32,470 Revenue Tons carried. By then the railroad was also paying a dividend of 10% to its shareholders.

Between 1889 and 1894 Bisbee's output of copper ore was typically 5000 or 6000 tons annually. It usually required 2 tons of coke and 1 or 2 tons of bituminous coal to produce a single ton of smelted copper. As such coal & coke accounted for about 80% of tonnage hauled by the railroad.

Next Chapter - The Year 1894