Moments before Disaster
With nearly 200 cars on the drawbars, a quartet of EMDs for the Alabama & Tennessee River Railway are at a real slow crawl as they howl to get the tonnage up the grade near Trussville. The shadow being formed by a cloud in this photo was quite the foreshadow (pun intended) of events as moments after this photo, the 9401 began to buck real hard after losing its grip. This caused the train to stall & force them to end up doubling their train into Birmingham. In other words, a typical day on the ATN as management loves to often overburden the Gadsden-Birmingham road train like this despite incidents like this happening all the time, at least whenever I’ve tried to shoot the road train. You’d think they’d learn their lesson, but that’s sadly a trend that’s way too common at too many places. 11-11-24
Moments before Disaster
With nearly 200 cars on the drawbars, a quartet of EMDs for the Alabama & Tennessee River Railway are at a real slow crawl as they howl to get the tonnage up the grade near Trussville. The shadow being formed by a cloud in this photo was quite the foreshadow (pun intended) of events as moments after this photo, the 9401 began to buck real hard after losing its grip. This caused the train to stall & force them to end up doubling their train into Birmingham. In other words, a typical day on the ATN as management loves to often overburden the Gadsden-Birmingham road train like this despite incidents like this happening all the time, at least whenever I’ve tried to shoot the road train. You’d think they’d learn their lesson, but that’s sadly a trend that’s way too common at too many places. 11-11-24