FL9

On December 30th before lunch my wife and I began a 2400-mile round trip to Disney World near Orlando, Florida to visit with family at the park.  We planned to spend the first night in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and we followed heavy rain storms all the way.  We stopped for a few minutes in the afternoon at Gibsland, Lousiana to check out the Lousiana & Northwest shortline.  I had not been here since the mid-1970’s when I photographed their F-units running (material for a future blog), but not much had changed in appearance.  The shop building and its contents were locked up tight, but an old GP35 #54 sat abandoned out back.

Nothing was close on the KCS and the already poor light was deteriorating rapidly, so I took one more shot of the swing gate protecting the crossing, as these seem to be an increasingly rare find.

We made it into Vicksburg about an hour after dark, having caught up with the rain.  The next day, Sunday December 31st, was our “long” day of the outbound trip as we planned to drive close to 500 miles to Tallahassee, Florida before tying up for the night.  We left I20 at Jackson and headed southeast towards Mobile, Alabama.  We roughly paralleled an unsignaled Illinois Central track in good condition, and at Collins, Mississippi I spotted a pair of locomotives sitting outside a chicken feed mill beside the highway.  We pulled off for a leg stretch, and I first shot a broadside of the lead unit, a conventional cab SD70.

A nose shot was impossible due to the ditch below my vantage point being flooded beyond easy passage.  The trailing unit was a CN GE, and the power appeared to be in the process of delivering a train load of chicken feed when they shut down.

Obviously nothing spectacular for my last shots of 2006, and we saw no other trains the rest of the day on the way to our motel in Tallahassee for New Year’s Eve.