Jumping back to September 18th when Judy and I were driving from Texas to West Virginia, after leaving rainy Tennessee behind we drove northeast into Kentucky. After passing near Paducah on Interstate 24 we got onto the Western Kentucky Parkway heading towards Louisville. The regional Paducah & Louisville mainline roughly follows this route between those two cities, but when we ran this highway two years ago we saw and heard nothing. However this time around while the radio was scanning all 97 channels it stopped on AAR 42, and as we drove northeast transmissions by hot box detectors and a train calling signals went from scratchy to clear as a bell as we overtook an unseen eastbound train. Finally about 15 miles west of Princeton we passed over the tracks and I looked east to see a bright green CTC signal. Figuring we were now ahead of the train I peeled off the Parkway on Highway 62 and followed the GPS map to a grade crossing about two miles further east then south on Highway 818. After about twenty minutes a headlight appeared to the west coming upgrade, and it grew into an empty coal train led by a P&H GP40-3 mother/slug set and an ex-Oakway SD60. The rain we had endured earlier was now gone, but a slight overcast remained.
The train was only doing about 30 mph, so we had no problem making our way back to Highway 62 and beating the train into the town of Princeton where we set up at the main crossing. The sun was out now when the train rolled by.
A close-up of the clean and well painted lead unit number 2117.
The slug number 2120 looked equally good rolling by.
Now far from it’s original assignments, the ex-Oakway GMTX 9013 bringing up the rear looks familiar.
I’ll bet if I look through my slide collection I can find a shot of it leading a coal train through Tower 55 in the early 90’s.
