HABLA HISPANA -1, COM 5 en 15 fotos con el Codigo
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Later in the day, a small but intense thunderstorm came through. I just finished some stuff around the house, so I ran out to Shakers to see them depart. This is the GALLIN with a BCOL and AGP snoot trailing. An ex-CITIRAIL GEVO was the DPU as well.
After waking up in Evanston and being surprised by the clear skies, we decided to head down the hill to look for something to shoot. We had gone to bed not being able to see stars because of smoke, so the clear skies were largely unexpected. For the second year in a row, we arrived at the overpass at Emory only for a train to be literally passing under us upon arrival. Last year I shot two absolute beaters near summit, and given that I love the spot (seen here) and the leader was a marginally better repainted GEVO (with a peeling flag of course), I decided to get an updated shot here. At one point while I was sitting and waiting atop the tunnel portal for 5367 (I’ll share one day), dispatch called out three approaching trains to a foreman near Evanston: 9802, 5367, and 8202. My eyes lit up. 9802…where? How could it be first if I only saw 5367? Somehow, with my luck, dispatch mentions 9802 is leading a hot priority train around the other two trains on MT1, and with my brain still processing all the information I am hearing, I see it — A headlight in the hills. Within 30 seconds, the head end is already passing by me. As I watch the shiny new leader pass by, it is only then I process everything that could have happened, and all the variables at play.
Had we been five minutes earlier on our way down the hill, do we see the Z first? Do I process then the shots that open up by having an eastbound go up the wrong main? Had dispatch been 2 minutes earlier, am I able to run up the hill to the right to snap a shot?
At the end of the day, none of it really matters. This same line of questioning can be inversely applied to situations where every variable lands on the right outcome, so perhaps it all balances out. More than anything else, I enjoy being out here and even having the opportunity to snap off some frames. This day and age, with the lack of anything truly groundbreaking to shoot, I am not going to win any awards, so all of this is for personal enjoyment anyways. Besides, many of you know I don’t mind shooting stuff like this, and I think I have a good explanation. I get that many of us, including myself, all enjoy subjects that are “rare” or “old” or anything else out of the ordinary, but it’s all relative. I think about it this way— we all grow up surrounded by the current culture - whether that be entertainment, or music, or any other facet of life, and we become accustomed to it. Some of us will disperse, but generally speaking, we get stuck in the timeframe in which we grew up. We love the music, or the movies, or the art, and perhaps even the trains, and we generally stick with it. We might even remark about how everything has gotten worse as time goes on, believing the era we grew up in is superior to the present. So just like how many of you grew up and became accustomed to what you saw, this is the era I became accustomed to. As a child, perhaps you looked out your car window on a family road trip to see tunnel motors hauling coal over Tennessee Pass, setting out on a mission in the coming years to snap a photo to freeze it in time. I looked out my car window on trips to California and Colorado to see brand new sets of UP GEs and ACes flying clean American flags, hauling solid sets of red K Line containers or the beloved blue Pacer Stacktrain containers. The railroads are a far cry of what they were a decade ago, but many of the scenes still remind me of the railroad I aspired to work for as a kid. The next time you get in the car and play your favorite songs from your childhood, you’ll remember what I said here about us always falling back on what we know best, even if those times are long gone. Perhaps I continue to shoot the same lousy scenes in an attempt to hold on to my childhood, a time in which I would love to go back, but from the eyes of my current self.
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About the train — This is a coal train coming from the TS Power Plant in Dunphy, NV. The coal plant is jointly owned and operated by Nevada Gold Mines and Newmont Mining Corp. The plant generates up to 215 MW of electricity to help power their gold and copper mining operations. The plant is in the process of converting to natural gas and was expected to be completed at the end of 2022 or start of 2023, yet it continues to burn coal. The latest update I found states they are still in the process of conversion.
CNOBT9 04
September 5, 2024 - 9:00AM
Wahsatch, UT // UP Evanston Sub