FL9

At around 1:15pm Sunday afternoon the sun was high overhead and the temperature was over 100 degrees, which made it a perfect time to stay home and sort slides or work on a model.  So instead of doing the comfortable thing, I headed back out to meet up with engineer Troy Minnick when he brought the Grapevine passenger train into the Stockyards.  I needed to give Troy some HO scale detail parts for a New Haven Alco RS-11 he is working on for me.  I pulled up to the Stockyards just as Troy was crossing Tower 60, and I noticed the purple sage was blooming in the park on the north side of Marine Creek.  I tried to work in as much of one bush as possible as GVRR #2199 arrived with Sunday’s train.

After the train was parked, Troy and I exchanged parts and conversed for a few minutes before he headed off to find something to eat, and I drove on towards Hodge Yard to check on the Green Goat progress.  I made a brief stop at Tower 60 and walked up onto the Samuels Avenue bridge over the Trinity River to shoot across at this northbound BNSF empty grain train on the Fort Worth Sub.

As soon as his rear end passed and I drove over the tracks, a northbound headlight greeted me from the UP’s Choctaw Sub Main One, and I let this empty coal train chase me up to the Decatur Avenue crossing where I pulled over for this grab shot.

The second unit was an unpatched SP, but I did not register that in my brain quick enough to catch a shot of it before it had gone on by.  He was moving right along, and within a minute or two the DPU shoved on past and up the hill.

Up at Hodge the Railpower personnel were still hard at work, now harnessing the replacement batteries into their racks.  I visited with the FWWR afternoon switch crew for a few minutes, and then drove past the Green Goats on their north side.

A few of the new batteries were visible at one point, but I did not take the time to change to the 100-400mm telephoto.

Instead I waited until processing time and zoomed in more using Photoshop.

They appear to be cabled up in vertical rows, the big orange cables bringing the returns from the bottom of each stack back to the top.  I needed to get back home, so I hopped on I35 south to then head west on I30 downtown.  When I got there the BNSF transfer job coming back from UP Centennial Yard was waiting short of Tower 55.  I pulled over for a moment since the sun was behind a cloud in what would have been otherwise a backlit scene.

So ends the three parts of what turned out photographically to be a pretty good Sunday.