FL9

Today and tomorrow are going to be overtime days at work and then I’ll be in Sweetwater on dialup access for the long Labor Day weekend taking care of my father.  As a result I have already loaded some pictures and brief text and put the website on autopilot to publish an entry each day until next Tuesday.  Have a nice holiday, I hope!

August of 1996 found myself and friends chasing a loaded AT&SF coal train south from Las Animas, CO on its way down to Boise City, OK and on to Amarillo.  After about twenty miles we were ready to give up the chase and head back to La Junta, but we needed something to “identify” the final shot as the train rolled through the non-descript plains of southeastern Colorado.  Only a mile or two ahead of him, we found it in the form of the station sign at Ruxton, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  It was the ideal landmark to place in the photo with the three ATSF and one UP Ge’s on the point.

This still being the time of cabooses on most all trains, it also made for the perfect going away shot with extended vison caboose #999716 bringing up the rear instead of today’s common DPU’s.

This gave us closure on the chase, so we headed on back towards La Junta and Trinidad for more action.

Not a bad locomotive lashup, and a pretty fair poker hand also.  In the summer of 1998 when it was evident that the UP would be closing the Tennessee Pass line, I scheduled one more vacation dedicated to that area of Colorado.  I followed another car of railfans as we left Fort Worth at 5:00pm and drove all night to reach Parkdale at sunrise the next morning.  I don’t think I could pull that off again now at the advanced age of 51!

After a day of rubbing shoulders with other fans catching trains with pure SP power over the Pass near Minturn, the next day I decided to drive back to Parkdale on a “fishing” expedition.  It was overcast east of Leadville, so everyone else decided to stay around Minturn and Tennessee Pass.  The clouds became broken around Salida, and in the late afternoon I heard the dispatcher talking to the Rio Grande 5403 West just east of Canon City.  Hoping for at least a Rio Grande leader, I set up next to the highway where the tracks emerge from the Royal Gorge at Parkdale.  When he rolled out of the Gorge, even though one cloud had decided to obscure the sun, I felt like I had discovered the Holy Grail when I saw this pure lashup of SD40T-2’s.

The Rio Grande #5403, #5411, #5386 and #5383 had an empty coal train in tow as they snaked on west through the canyons.  I managed to catch him in multiple locations both with and without sun.  Here is one of the full-sun shots near Cotopaxi along the banks of the Arkansas River.

I kept expecting someone to show up and join in the chase, but I was alone at each spot that had been crowded the day before.  I lost the light before he reached Leadville, and so I headed on over Tennessee Pass to Minturn to have dinner at the Turntable Restaurant with the other foamers.  When I arrived and everyone was joking at my expense about my heading into the clouds for the afternoon, no one believed the story of my catch since this was pre-digital.  But an hour later when he pulled up outside the back door for a quick crew change, no one was laughing but me.

I feel that for me this was one of those lucky chases of a lifetime, never to be repeated.  Thank goodness for the invention of the camera, and so I’ll share more from that afternoon sometime in the future.

Unfortunately I only made one trip to Colorado back in 1985 while the Denver & Rio Grande was a separate entity.  Those slides will turn up one of these days.  By the time I returned in October of 1996, the Rio Grande had vanished into the Southern Pacific which in turn on September 11th of that year was merged into the Union Pacific.  With a little help from friends, bits and pieces could still be found.  Here for example are two venerable GP30’s on the Rocky Flats local with the front range in the background.

While today you can go to the Colorado Railroad Museum and see F-7A #5771 anytime, back in 1996 it was being stored for the museum inside the Coors Brewery.  After shooting the GP30’s in the morning, later that same day we looked at its roofline behind some equipment and a tall fence.  We decided nothing ventured nothing gained, so we asked a security guard at a nearby gate if we could go in for a few minutes to photograph it.  Even though we were in a far corner of the complex, we were surprised when he said to get in, get our shots, and get back out.  Maybe he was a closet foamer?  We soaked up the history as quickly as we could, and I took this head on shot that looks like the engine could still be in service; sitting in an engine terminal somewhere on the system awaiting its next assignment.

Tomorrow I will share another lucky Rio Grande catch.

The weathermen said we would finally get some relief from the heat and drought starting this afternoon as a cold front moves in from the north.  John Briggs and I decided to get out early this morning before the front arrived, and that turned out to be a good decision.  The TRE dispatcher spoke to a BNSF loaded coal train that wanted to head east to Dallas enroute to Teague, preferring the empty commuter line today to the UP Midlothian Sub.  We set up on the east bank of the Trinity River and got a good view with the morning-lit skyline as a backdrop.

(Read on …)