FL9

Back on January 11th in 2005 I made a special effort to catch Amtrak P42 #115 specially painted to mimic a Toyota Tundra pickup for the advertising dollars poured into the Amtrak coffers.  They put advertising on the sides of airplanes, city busses, taxis, so why not trains?  I think an Amtrak P42 is a pretty ugly excuse for a locomotive, but that big flat side does make a good canvas and a reasonable image of a pickup truck.    I had learned the 115 would be on Train #22 this day, so I went down to the west side of Broadway Street first to get a broadside view as he approached Tower 55.

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I and other Texans had succcessfully competed in CTC Board Magazine’s “Day in North America” (DINA) in years gone by, but this time around the rules were different for the 2005 competition.  Set for Wednesday December 28th, instead of submitting twenty or so of our best shots with captions, this time we were to submit only three shots and an accompanying “essay” long caption.

Being a week day this time instead of a Saturday, I could only get the afternoon off, so I decided to go with a sure thing and photograph the Grapevine passenger train at the stockyards and on the run to Eighth Avenue.  When the results were published in the February 2006 issue, the requested format had been scrapped, but it did not matter to me anyway as I found I did not make the cut this time around.  It did make the grade for my website, and so now I’ll let you be the judge as to if it is worth reading:

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After a busy morning of railfanning, I was planning on working at home in the cool air conditioning Sunday afternoon on Father’s Day, but Brian Tindle called to say he was going to catch a westbound UP intermodal at my favorite cut on the Baird Sub in Boaz Park about a mile from the house.  I could not resist and grabbed up the camera and headed out into the heat.  I met Brian on top of the cut, and the radio told us the dispatcher was going to bring the MODFW train in while the ZNSLC was undergoing his 1000-mile inspection.  The afternoon light did not favor eastbounds, but I took the shot anyway as a challenge to deal with the backlighting as he swept around the curve towards us.

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Father’s Day and pollution-free sunshine were good enough excuses to get out for a few hours Sunday morning.  First up is this northbound BNSF at the south end of Birds where he is about to meet the Cleburne Local.

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