September 2007 – NOGC Grain Train, Gretna, New Orleans

by Jim on 2012/09/25

[Jimbaux keeps learning that people are strange when you’re a stranger.]

Actually, people can be disturbingly stupid and irrational and angry.  Wow.  Have you ever experienced something that made your already shaky faith in humanity take a nosedive?  Please don’t assume so much!

Nearly a year-and-a-half ago, my father wrote this to me as we were discussing some disgusting behavior from a mob of our fellow Americans:

It has been my lifetime observation that mob mentality is the most dangerous human force I know.  Individual judgment is suspended in favor of “fitting in” as ordinarily rational people “go with the flow.”

People can’t think on multiple planes as a mob because they become singular in thought and action. Students do this at school as they grow up and transpose this behavior to a lot of things in their adult life. That includes, in this case, both on the campus and those on the Internet’s social networks.

So, so true it is, and so true it seems now.  Persons are okay, but people can truly be scary.

Grain Train In The Membrane

Anyway, here are some pictures taken back in September 2007, 25 September 2007 to be precise, followed by a couple taken three days before.  We’re in Gretna on the New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway as an empty grain train is returning from to Gouldsboro Yard from Myrtle Grove, but, first, let’s take a look to see what is parked and idle in the yard under the CCC bridges.

We’re actually in New Orleans in this picture, as Gretna is just to the left.  We’re in Algiers, the part of New Orleans west of the river.  This is Brooklyn Avenue, but it becomes Madison Street once you enter Gretna, where the street running where this empty NOGC grain train is.

See that pedestrian crossing warning sign to the right?  That’s where about four years later I was standing when I was told that taking pictures of trains here was illegal.  Imagine that.  Anyway, here’s a slightly wider view.

I guess I like the first of those two better, though both have merit.  Anyway, here’s a hard-to-classify grab shot.

And, here’s a going-away shot showing, yet again, that this is a street, and that cars do park right next to the track, meaning that if it’s illegal to take pictures here, it should be also illegal to park, right?

Yeah, I don’t want to dig into the past too much here, which is why I’m not hyperlinking the old article like I do with so many other things, especially since the ‘controversy’ came from someone who was so green.

Departure

As I recently wrote in the caption accompanying another picture of a grain train at Gouldsboro Yard which detailed the saw-by process of moving grain trains through that yard, the days of large road power for UP’s grain trains on the NOGC were soon coming to an end.  Here, oddly enough, we see KCS power on this grain train, the only time that I recall such on the NOGC.

Well, isn’t that special?  Have you wet yourself yet?  Yeah, I know.

Three Days Before

Gentilly Lameness

So, here we are in New Orleans on Saturday 22 September 2007, seeing an empty unit sulphur train from the CSX to the UP, I think to Tyler, Texas, but I don’t know.

Yeah, I know; we’ve really made a descent with that shot.  Maybe the below one is better.

I’m inclined to think that that was NS’s morningly transfer to the CN on its way back to NS Oliver Yard, but that seems so weird now that the train only uses one unit today.  Maybe because the 141 was still terminating at Mays Yard and that this job was bringing the road power back too.  I don’t know.

A Good Interlude

What I do know is that the next evening, I was blessed with a fabulous catch at KCS’s New Orleans Yard.

Those were good times, weren’t they?  What are you doing to document the good times of today?

Jimbaux

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

1 Ray Duplechain September 26, 2012 at 22:46

KCS 4600 shot is agreat photo; seldom seen in photos, tree overhangin over right of way and good looking trrack and clean locomotive….good stuff, thanks…

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