FL9

Before long we were making our first station stop since Essex as we pulled into Browning, MT.  I would not want to be standing under that eave when the snow lets go!

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Between Summit and Bison looking east someone has a very nice chalet from which to watch trains.  It looks like a great place to be snowed in.

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I am actually writing this Christmas Day post on Friday, so I have some catching up to do.  Next I will go to the other extreme and write enough posts in advance to appear through January 10th, as I will be out of town until then.  This should allow me to finish off the rest of the return trip from Montana to Texas via Amtrak.

My wife and I are driving to Disneyworld near Orlando to meet family and watch the children play, so there won’t be too many train pictures from this trip due to the miles we need to cover.  Disneyworld has a behind-the-scenes tour of their steam railroad that sounded interesting at first.  Then I learned photography is not allowed during the bulk of the trip, so I decided to pass on it.

So now we will pick up where I left off as we boarded the eastbound Empire Builder at Essex, MT on the morning of October 17th, 2006.  Once we got settled in our sleeper compartment, I got the camera ready for this different view of all we had seen around Marias Pass over the past few days from the highways.  The sun was making brief appearances, and we could see signs of snow now as our elevation increased.

  

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Upcoming pictures will actually feature some snow, but here in Benbrook, Texas it is hard to get in the seasonal mood when the sky is overcast and you barely need a jacket to go outside on Christmas Eve.  Another railroad subject that was painted in bright colors, albeit for different reasons than the holiday season, was BN’s SD60M #1991 that was designed to honor those service men and women who participated in Desert Storm starting in 1990.  Here we see the unit on a loaded coal train eastbound on the Wichita Falls Sub at Henrietta, TX in January of 1993.

In the year 2000 this unit was painted into the BNSF’s Heritage II scheme and renumbered to 9299.