FL9

Late Saturday afternoon while we were shopping in Sweetwater with my father, the radio alerted us to two westbound BNSF trains approaching Tecific on the Lampassas Sub.  With some free time before dinner, we drove out that way and stopped first at the sewer plant crossing between Tecific and Sweetwater for a well-lit afternoon shot.  The first sound of a train turned out to be an eastbound UP on the Baird Sub a quarter-mile to the north, but as that sound died away the BNSF 5856 West came into view with an empty coal train in tow climbing the last grade into Sweetwater.

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This morning Judy and I left Benbrook around 8:30am to visit my father in Sweetwater.  We drove on I20 in heavy fog until a few miles west of the Brazos River where we finally broke out into partly cloudy skies.  As we approached the exit at the east end of Judd siding, the radio alerted us to the UP 8323 West meeting the BNSF 4564 East.  We pulled off and stopped on the side of the road just in time for this shot of the BNSF train accelerating out of the siding.

(Read on …)

I went back to the “T”’s again for today’s slide of a Baldwin DS-4-4-750, one of 53 built between 1949 and 1951, idling between work assignments at the Texas Mexican Railway yard in Laredo, Texas.

When I took this photo on July 19th in 1974, this locomotive was around 25 years old, and the Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton Locomotive Works had been out of business since 1956.  Take note of the unique capping system to close off all three stacks at once to keep water out.

While passing the BNSF yard office on the way out of Saginaw towards home last Sunday afternoon I pulled over on the shoulder for one more photograph.  SD45-2’s are getting rare these days, and the 6480 was sitting there between assignments in good broadside light.

After I got home and post-processed the raw image I got to thinking about the history of this unit, and found out on the web from various rosters the BNSF 6480 had started out as the ATSF 5646.  This sent me to the slide boxes, and sure enough within a few minutes I came up with this Kodachrome from September in 1975 of the 5646 southbound at Noble, Oklahoma with a sister unit pulling the 395 train from Kansas City to Houston.

I have gotten older and not necessarily better over the past 32 years since I took this picture; and in comparison like me the 5646 now 6480 has also fallen from powering mainline hotshots to yard and transfer duties……