View allAll Photos Tagged HotShots
CPKC’s new daily northbound intermodal, 181, seems to be seeing mild success, with the train I shot on 5/20 being all of 20 cars long with two KCSM GEVOs on the point
As many will probably know from Danny Harmon's famous videos on the tropicana juice trains, these used to run as a hotshot unit train from Florida to NJ. During CSX's implementation of PSR, they were relegated to lower-priority manifests M300 and M301, both of which are reliably daylight trains on the RF&P. And while these trains do usually move with a purpose, they're not exactly the hottest trains on the railroad. That pace apparently wasn't working for Tropicana, and very recently the juice has been moved back to priority intermodal trains I031 and I032. While they're not the juice trains of old, it's still pretty neat to see the juice back on the headpin of the hottest trains on the RF&P.
Hotshot NS 203 hustles South through Thomasville after midnight with a CN C40-8 leading the way South to Atlanta.
Cruising through the community of Matfield Green, KS, a westbound BNSF "Z" train is making its way down the southern transcon on a mostly sunny Saturday, March 1, 2025 afternoon.
The Shasta Route crests the southern Cascades in Siskiyou County, California about a mile and a half east of Grass Lake siding. From there, eastbounds negotiate 22 miles of continual downgrade before they encounter level trackage on the floor of the Butte Valley at Mount Hebron. Having completed the descent, an LABRD flies through Mount Hebron on August 1, 1994. Since the train is about fifteen minutes behind Amtrak 14, it should have a swift trip to the crew change at Klamath Falls.
At the time, double stack traffic was fairly rare on the Shasta Route. My notes on the slide mount say that the symbol of this train was LABRD, which I would guess I discovered at the time from either radio traffic or a crew standing lineup message. I'm not sure what the "D" in LABRD signified, as it was typically used for detours or reroutes. Anyone?
CP 4443 is in charge of a 2-198 at Weaver West on a humid August 19th, 2018 morning approaching the west end of siding. I hated this rendition of the CP scheme with the giant space between the C and P, as if leaving space for a CA headlight package that wasn't there on these former SOO 4400's, as well as the hump service equipment on the roof. I couldn't care less, now, as this along with many others will probably never lead again out on the main without PTC.
Hotshot westbound Z-train blast across the Chariton River outside of Elmer. The train is working from Willow Springs, IL, to Stockton, CA, and is between Ethel and Marceline on the Marceline Sub. Fog is still burning off in the low lying areas after temperatures fell just below freezing on this fairly warm December. I was surprised that snow from last weekend snow storm was still around in a few spots.
The Pennsy heritage unit leads 229, the hottest train that runs on the Atlanta North District, through Austell. 8-9-21
An eastbound intermodal train that looks like the very hot LABRF (Los Angeles - BRooklyn Forwarder) climbs the grade through Cougar, California on a May evening in 1986.
If you look closely at the locomotives, there's a very rare (for the Oregon Division) GE sandwiched in the trio of tunnel motors.
BNSF M-EVESUM heads north for Sumas through some farmlands scenes on a gorgeous summer evening. 6-22-23
Hotshot train #971, has three burners from EMD------->>> ATSF3811,ATSF4027,ATSF3837, GP50,GP60,GP50. These geeps were used on the hottest of hot trains and put on a lot of miles bouncing back and forth from Chicago to west coast and back. This is Rock Creek Jct on the east side of the KC metroplex and hosted tons of variety in 1990. Scanned from a SFW negative.
Railfanning, on February 6th, 2026: (After Work Specials✅🚂️)
At CN Port Kells BC, MP’s108.15/106.0 CNR Yale Subdivision.
TRAIN 1: CN Train M35651-06 East (CN Mixed, Freight) CN (ES44) 2810, & Mid DPU CN (ES44/CITI) 3921. Axle count 628. (Length 9,854ft) (154 cars, mix bag) (At 3:50PM) (North Track) (Noice K5HL!) (50mph!)
TRAIN 2: VIA Train P00251-06 East (The Canadian, Passenger) VIA (F40) 6451, & VIA (F40) 6459. Axle count 56. (Length 1,400ft) (12 coaches) (At 4:30PM) (North Track) (60mph!)
The BN really had the St Paul to Chicago traffic captured back in the 90's. Many of these Expediters ran the route with decent amounts of hot traffic. Now days seems like BNSF has maybe 1 train each way a day? Back in the day #42 was the mid-morning hotshot thru East Dubuque. Here a MRL 40 helps out a cabless GE as they make trails on the 182 miles still left to Chicago.
Scanned slide on 7-07-94.
SOO 6001 and MILW 203 hustle through Sparta with eastbound COFC on train 208 early in the morning on September 24, 1987. A couple years earlier these Shoreham-St. Luc containers would have been traversing northern WI and the Upper Peninsula on trains 909/910. While I understood the rerouting of the Schiller Park-St. Luc traffic I always had problems coming to terms with the Shoreham stuff going through Chicago. It added about as much distance to the Shoreham-St. Luc trip as the SOO saved on the rerouting of the Schiller-St. Luc stuff through the Lower Peninsula. A rescan from 3 years ago.
CSX Intermodal I032-17 is headed out of Savannah GA at big hill road with amazing light. This train had just started to get going after catching a hotbox defect.
In the era of PTC sometimes you just have to include those ugly antennas in your shot and cut off the top of them. A stack train bound for Atlanta wastes no time zipping by the control point at East Brandon.
Q234 screams into Casey, Illinois, with frames and boxcars of body panels for assembly plants in Michigan.
Late in the day on a cool Sunday, March 30, 2025 afternoon, a westbound BNSF "Z" intermodal train heads out of Neosho, MO on the Cherokee Subdivision.
For once I’m not upset about a delayed train. After about a 3 week pause due to spring cleaning, BNSF’s U KEEMAD’s are back in action. Though they’ve all been running up here during night. This is the first load this year to make it during daylight. A combination of things all made that happen. These are some of the coolest trains we get up here in my humble opinion. Definitely a BN memory!
A westbound pig train approaches Yucca, Arizona at midday in June 1988. Sometimes, you would just pull over when you saw the headlight in the distance, and hope for the best.
The “Race That Stops a Nation” didn’t stop Pacific National's "Hotshot" single-deck intermodal 2SP7 from Sydney to Perth seen skirting the shores of Menindee Lakes led by NR10-NR117 on Melbourne Cup Day, 4 November, 2025.
(25W.10498_PN_NR10-117_2SP7_LakesWt)
Wisconsin Central train T218 was blasting southward behind a matched set of SD45s on a warm and sunny afternoon in the Chicagoland suburbs in 1999.
This hot train from Green Bay kept a lot of Scheider trailers off of Interstate 94 until Canadian National came along and pissed away this traffic.
Everyone seemed to enjoy my other Ashland post, so lets roll with another one this fine Thursday evening. Beginning in November, the RF&P is a busy place as a mainstay on CSX's I-95 corridor. The addition of 2-3 hotshot intermodal trains per day, mixed in with Amtrak and regular traffic, makes this the place to be for train watching in Virginia. After cooling their heels in a siding for a few holiday extras, low-priority coal drag F742 rolls through Ashland, Virginia in gorgeous late afternoon lighting. With a lot of traffic for the 2 mains, the BD Desk was getting a workout juggling all the traffic.
One of the hottest trains on Conrail's River Line was TVLA. It handled a solid TOFC consist from North Bergen, NJ to Los Angeles, CA via a connection with the Santa Fe at Corwith Yard in Chicago (where it became QNYLA). TVLA was scheduled to depart North Bergen at 7:30am and usually did so on time. In the spring and summer months it was possible get a bit of sun on the nose in places as the train headed north. TVLA is seen here motoring through CP7 in Bogota at 8:00am on the nose, laying down a hazy trail of exhaust in the process. No doubt the River Line dispatcher was working to keep the train moving along at track speed. 3-4 four-axle units was the norm on TVLA in the early 90s.
Conrail TVLA:
CR 3323 GP40-2
CR 5072 B40-8
CR 5061 B40-8
USAF Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II 19-5493 of the 493rd FS at Lakenheath blasts off with full reheat at Farnborough.