fun again for the time being
Anyone that doesnt know me personally can simply take a stroll thru my albums here on flickr and realize quite fast how much time I spent photographing the former Milwaukee Road between Bensenville and Savanna. Easy to call it an obsession, and I wouldn’t argue that one bit. You get to know a railroad and formulate a chase plan with ease. No wasted time and you come away with decent results usually.
Sure, I neglected lots of other subjects the past 20 years, but you have to pick SOMETHING that entertains you. In the present day age of facebook groups and live railcam feeds on YouTube, the intel is out there most days. And even better so, it seems like CPKC has fallen into a pattern along the D&I. A morning eastbound isn’t hard to find. The allure of KCS Belle painted engines - long past their most beautiful days - is enough motivation to hop in the car and refamiliarize myself with the chase highway along Route 72.
So here’s how things are currently. 253 is the general freight symbol eastbound from Savanna nearly every morning. To better align with the overall big picture of north//south in the greater CPKC system, what used to be a westbound symbol for a long while has now become an eastbound symbol. This one “originates” in Kansas City, bound for Bensenville. The westbound (southbound) 252 is a Bensenville to Shreveport long haul apparently. Like every other class one nowadays these symbols are hardly concrete info, as the books can be cooked and the right people be deceived with any given train. This version of 253 happens to be a full train of loaded autoracks. It sure didn’t look that way when it passed the Savanna railcam predawn a couple hours earlier. I can only imagine there is some other northbound from Kansas City that will clean up the mess left behind in Muscatine, Nahant and Savanna to bring in whatever general merchandise that was left behind - only to leave a mess behind for the next one behind it.
And so on and so on…
fun again for the time being
Anyone that doesnt know me personally can simply take a stroll thru my albums here on flickr and realize quite fast how much time I spent photographing the former Milwaukee Road between Bensenville and Savanna. Easy to call it an obsession, and I wouldn’t argue that one bit. You get to know a railroad and formulate a chase plan with ease. No wasted time and you come away with decent results usually.
Sure, I neglected lots of other subjects the past 20 years, but you have to pick SOMETHING that entertains you. In the present day age of facebook groups and live railcam feeds on YouTube, the intel is out there most days. And even better so, it seems like CPKC has fallen into a pattern along the D&I. A morning eastbound isn’t hard to find. The allure of KCS Belle painted engines - long past their most beautiful days - is enough motivation to hop in the car and refamiliarize myself with the chase highway along Route 72.
So here’s how things are currently. 253 is the general freight symbol eastbound from Savanna nearly every morning. To better align with the overall big picture of north//south in the greater CPKC system, what used to be a westbound symbol for a long while has now become an eastbound symbol. This one “originates” in Kansas City, bound for Bensenville. The westbound (southbound) 252 is a Bensenville to Shreveport long haul apparently. Like every other class one nowadays these symbols are hardly concrete info, as the books can be cooked and the right people be deceived with any given train. This version of 253 happens to be a full train of loaded autoracks. It sure didn’t look that way when it passed the Savanna railcam predawn a couple hours earlier. I can only imagine there is some other northbound from Kansas City that will clean up the mess left behind in Muscatine, Nahant and Savanna to bring in whatever general merchandise that was left behind - only to leave a mess behind for the next one behind it.
And so on and so on…