It's not every day Amtrak 7 passes thru Minot several hours off the advertised, but at sunset on the last day of September, it did, and behind a BNSF freight leader.
From 03/11/1995 at Speers Ferry (aka Copper Creek), VA on the former Clinchfield, a CSX coal train moves south. A former SOU line operated by NS is seen beneath. Unfortunately, the location has since become treed in, the bane of eastern railfans.
For a while now, Huron and Eastern has been calling at Marlette to service the elevator in the middle of the night, making photography somewhat difficult to say the least. On Teusday night, however, HESR's "rat rod" #2028 in all its gray primered glory came into town to pick up a solitary carload of biodiesel. I managed to catch it crawling up the mile long weedgrown elevator siding after running around the tank car. Often they will bring two locomotives and leave town with the car spliced between them just to avoid this kind of a move, but the elevator track was clear on this night.
After the Union Pacific retired the 100 year old Tower 17 in early 2004, they donated the structure to the Rosenberg Railroad Museum provided that we move it off site. We contracted Cherry House Movers to move the tower to the museum grounds. Here they are getting ready to lift the upper part of the structure off the lower walls and lower it onto steel beams and a dolly to be pulled by a truck.
Last Saturday (10/21/23) I caught this pai riding DPU into NS DeButts yard in Chattanooga. Thursday was the only day I left the office before dark:30 and since I was near I stopped in at Austell for a few minutes. No trains made an appearance so all I got for my trouble was an appearance on the Austell Rail Cam (Me in the red truck)
Drones are wonderful! I was looking at this drone video and I realized that it was like looking at a highly detailed model railroad! Then I thought what a great tool drones are for modelers!!!! What do you guys think?
I have been tempted. However learning a new skill is intimidating to me these days. This old curmudgeon's brain is about to blow up with all the new stuff I have to keep learning over just to operate my smart phone every time it gets updated.
If you have a desk top computer, there isn't much to learn. YouTube has a lot of railroad videos and the use of drones is increasing. So, if you're watching a drone video on youtube and you see a scene you'd like to model just press your screen capture button. It's like a shutter on a camera. Basically it's just a copy and paste function. If you have windows, you can open your Paint program and paste your capture there. From there you can save it to any file you like. It's that easy.
Oh, I can handle that. I was talking about getting a drone for myself and learning how to fly. Like Akirasho does a lot of and posts on the random photos thread in the Cattle Car Forum.
Not a bad idea at all! One could be equipped with a grappling tool to pick up derailed cars from that corner of the layout that's just out of reach... Though flying one in a spare room in an apartment would be a tad perilous. I'm thinking unexpected haircuts...
That's what happens when one gets one's head clipped by one of those dang things... You got to remember you're talking to textbook specimens of the Possum Lodge. We can go from making sense to racing chainsaws in a heartbeat...
That does become more of a challenge as we mature. We learned so much in our youth that is no longer understood or accepted.
