FL9

About the time I was finishing up with the meet at Avondale, railfans at Saginaw called me to say that two empty rock trains were heading north on the UP Duncan Sub.  I flipped over to that channel, and figured out from the track warrants that even though the first one was already past me on his way to Chico, I could intercept the second one at Newark north of Hicks.  When I arrived I set up with the water tower in the background for identification, and I only had a few minutes to wait for this shot.

I thought I was down low enough not to distort the train too much while still cropping out the advertising billboard overhead, but I did not quite succeed.  His whole train of empties was made up of rock hoppers with “CMO” reporting marks.

A little research revealed this stands for the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway, which was a subsidiary of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the old days.  It is surprising how far back some of these ID’s can go.  With nothing else evident, I drove back to Saginaw and arrived just in time to see a UP mainfest train puling into the west pass at BNSF’s Saginaw Yard.  I hurried on down to the Industrial crossing north of the yard office for this picture of him passing the flour mill and the Saginaw city marker.

This had to be one of UP’s trackage rights trains over the BNSF from Kansas City to Fort Worth.  It turned out to have a very intriguing car in the consist in the form of this old ex-Delaware & Hudson hopper.

It’s new reporting marks of JOBX 4528 indicates it is now owned by railcar leasor Tealinc, Ltd.  With this now duly recorded on the compact flash card, I finally arrived at the Saginaw diamonds to visit with the gathered fans and capture a few last images for the day that I will share tomorrow.