FL9

After getting out Sunday morning, I worked around the house before getting out again around 3:30pm.  I waited too long in that as I was driving away from the house, I heard three westbounds get track warrants to leave Saginaw on the Wichita Falls Sub and meet an eastbound at Herman.  I decided to see if I could catch up to any of them, and made “track speed” around I820 and up Business 287 to the real 287 at Avondale.  BY now the first two westbounds–an empty UP coal train and an unknown train led by an SD40-2–were already passing Herman, but I managed to overtake the third one just as he was approaching the east switch.  It turned out to be a bare table train led by three smaller units.

(Read on …)

Yesterday we went back to the 1970’s, but today we’ll only go back to Sunday morning.  It was cool and clear, so I headed out to Saginaw for a few hours.  Driving over the Meacham Boulevard overpass, I could see a flashing red beckoning a northbound train into the yard at Saginaw while a soutbound was waiting.  I parked and got into position just in time to catch this train with the skyline in the background.

As soon as he cleared up into the yard, this southbound came down towards my position on the bridge.

I heard another southbound get clearance from DS22 to come on in to Saginaw from CP11.  I quickly repositioned to the grade crossing just north of the yard office, and was rewarded with this view of three SD40-2’s.  It won’t be too long before we’ll wish we could still find these in mainline service.

As soon as the SD40-2’s merchandise train cleared the north end of the transfer track from the old BN, a new train asked DS22 for clearance to head north towards Alliance.  I headed to the south end of Lake Wanda for this picture of his passage with the grain elevators as a backdrop.

This was the same angle I used a week or so ago with a warbonnet GE leading.  Listening to the radio, the next few trains approaching were not going to deliver anything interesting either, as all were led by more C44-9’s.  I decided to head home and try my luck in the late afternoon.

Tower 29 in Saginaw, TX was a manual lever interlocking constructed in 1903 to control the Rock Island’s crossings with the GC&SF and the FW&D.  It was always controlled and manned by the Rock Island up until the end of the Rock, and then by the AT&SF until the tower’s subsequent abandonment and destruction in 1985.  In this first view, I am looking south while standing on the west side of the Santa Fe with the FW&D crossings behind me and the Rock Island crossing visible underneath the pair of Amtrak SDP40F’s on northbound train #16 as it hammers over the diamonds on July 19th, 1975.

Four years later I am now looking north as hot AT&SF train #395 from Kansas City to Houston crosses the Fort Worth & Denver and is about to cross the Rock Island in the foreground on its journey south pulled by a pair of C30-7’s on January 28th, 1979.  The lead unit has remnants of snow on its plow carried down from a heavy storm up in Kansas.  At first I thought the slide had developed an imperfection, but checking with a magnifier that is a large flock of birds flying from east to west in the background.

The view was quite a bit different from today 27 years later when you stand in the Saginaw Chamber of Commerce parking lot and look at the same diamonds, now controlled by CTC signals and radios from about three miles away at BNSF headquarters.

For today’s not-so-oldies, first up we see three big GE’s lugging a southbound grain train from Enid, OK to Houston, TX up the grade from the Red River bridge to Gainesville in 1989.  The middle unit is a C30-7, but the lead and trailing units started life as U36-C’s and were subsequently rebuilt by the Santa Fe Cleburne Shops in to SF30-C’s.  There was no missing that bright aborted SP merger paint either.

An early morning call from a friend in July of 1992 sent me scrambling for the car keys when the word came through about a northbound Santa Fe inspection train leaving Fort Worth.  I was able to get ahead of him when he stopped in Gainesville to change crews, and I set up at the FM 1202 crossing north of town at the crest of the grade down to the river.  In a few minutes he came flying by, his spotlessly clean train powered by an equally clean B40-8W.

I had to wait five years to get another clean B40-8W on a passenger train, namely the Super Bowl Special headed south on January 27th in 1997.  He was not due into Fort Worth until after dark, so I got off from work early and drove north until I heard him on the radio leaving Marietta, OK.  I pulled over and set up on the west side of the tracks in the middle of the siding at Thackerville as the last rays of the direct sunlight were about to fade.  He came through a few minutes later just in the nick of time, powered by BNSF B40-8W #560 leading the now ex-BN Executive F-units.

We’ll see where the roulette wheel of old slides takes us tomorrow.