Who Am I?
This page was last updated on December 20, 2007.
My name is Don Strack. I have been interested in railroading and Union Pacific since my early teens, when I would ride my bicycle from my parent's suburban home, many, many miles to either Union Pacific's North Yard, or to Rio Grande's Roper Yard, both in Salt Lake City. My interest in Union Pacific started early and was nurtured by two uncles who worked for Union Pacific, one as a locomotive fireman and the other as a ticket agent. My specific interest in UP's diesel locomotives developed while employed for almost ten years (1969-1979) by Union Pacific as a journeyman mechanic in their Salt Lake Shops.
My interest in Utah's railroads and their history dates back to 1978, when at Ralph Gochnour's suggestion, I read Leonard Arrington's "Great Basin Kingdom." The value of this book was reinforced in 1980 by "Rocky" Rockwell and John Bromley, UP's public relations staff in Salt Lake City, as they both went out of their way to get me started in the study of UP history. Along with "Great Basin Kingdom", in 1978 Ralph Gochnour also suggested that I read Clarence Reeder's dissertation. Very soon I started comparing Reeder with David Johnson's earlier dissertation. My interest really took off in early 1979, when during a period of unemployment, I began spending time in the State of Utah's corporate records vault in the state capital, researching the various railroad companies incorporated in Utah.
My first chance at being published came in 1982 when I furnished a brief history of railroads in the Tintic mining district for Phillip Notarianni's "Faith, Hope, and Prosperity, the Tintic Mining District." Most of my publishing efforts later focused on Union Pacific's fleet of diesel locomotives, and I have completed numerous books and magazine articles, and also contributed to two books, all about UP's diesel locomotives. My first publication about Utah's railroading history came in 1997 with "Ogden Rails," a history of railroads in Ogden, Utah, from 1869 to today; I have also given four lectures on these same subjects. In addition, I have contributed to three book projects about Utah's railroad industry. Recently, I also completed a book about Union Pacific's cabooses, and a much improved and expanded second edition of "Ogden Rails".
Future projects include publications on 1) complete histories of Utah's coal mining and railroads, and Utah's copper mining and railroads, and 2) an examination of the relationship between Brigham Young and the Utah's pioneer railroads.
I discovered computers in 1986 using a Zenith 100 that my Dad built from a kit. It ran CP/M as an operating system, and used a DOS emulator. In November 1988 I bought an 8088 machine that had a 12mHz processor and 512k RAM. The journey continued in June 1991 with a new 286 machine, with GeoWorks as the OS, with 2meg of RAM and a 10meg hard drive. I bought Windows as an aftermarket OS for that machine. That first 12mHz computer from 1988 had a 12-inch amber monitor, as did the initial Zenith Z100. The new-in-1991 286 was a all-in-one-box deal, with my first color monitor. I replaced the 286 in April 1995 with a Pentium I, 75mHz machine. That one was replaced with a Pentium III, 800mHz machine in October 1999. The next upgrade came in January 2003 when I purchased a Dell Pentium 4, 2gHz machine, running XP Home.
In late December 2006, the Dell crashed for the third time in three years. Actually it was the hard drive controller on the Dell mother board that caused three separate hard drives to fail. Of course, it was only after the third time that I was able to troubleshoot the problem completely. This was on December 25th, and the next day, I visited the local Apple store and walked out with a new Apple 20-inch Intel iMac. I had tried an Apple Mac on several occasions, including owning an older one received from a friend who had upgraded his own MacIntosh. I've had a couple opportunities to buy a new Mac at a good discount, and gave it serious consideration, but they just never felt quite right. But owning a Mac was becoming more and more attractive due to my changing needs for working almost solely on web pages and scanning photos. The Dell crashing for the third time was the last straw, and I now use an iMac almost exlusively.
Between November 1998 and October 2003, I was the owner of an e-mail discussion group about railroad diesel locomotives called LocoNotes, with well over 1,000 subscribers. I started it as a forum for railfans and locomotive nuts. In the fast moving world of computers and the internet, the LocoNotes discussion group resided first on OneList, then it migrated to eGroups, then to YahooGroups. Although no longer involved with keeping track of the current locomotive scene, I continue to participate in other discussion groups about railroads in Utah and railroad modeling.
