Jimbaux needs to make you see . . .
Hello. How are you doing? Wasn’t this weekend gloriously photographic? especially yesterday? I think so.
Tres
Coming off of a much more photographically climactic weekend, I did manage to get a few not-so-inspiring pictures this afternoon. Let’s see them.
A Different Same View
We start in Gretna this afternoon at, as expected, Gouldsboro Yard, where we see, as expected, a parked NOGC train.
How is that? That hump between the camera and the train is the roadbed of the former track to the Perry Street Wharf. It is my wish – more like a fantasy – that that track be revived and be used to get shipments to and from the port. I’d love to see imported wind-turbine parts and imported and-or exported metals come through here. Not only would that be cool in its own right, but it would break up the tiresome monotony of the nearly-entirely-tank-car NOGC, and, furthermore, it would secure the survival of the line between Gouldsboro Yard and Harvey if the new routing to the proposed coal terminal ever gets built. Imagine a train of flat cars loaded with windmill parts, flat cars loaded with plate steel, and boxcars loaded with copper, moving down Fourth Street in Gretna.
All that we can do on that is imagine. In the meantime, we can still see some tank car action – or, as is the case here, inaction – here at Gouldsboro Yard.
Like I implied earlier, the views here get kind of monotonous with the almost-nothing-but-tank-car trains of the NOGC and the small locomotive roster. Here is the more traditional view.
That’s all that we’re going to get out of the NOGC today, since I’m not sticking around to see this same-old-same-old train move whenever. So, off we go, and on Monroe Street, we see this.
That’s cute. Gretna is an interesting place. Actually, every place is an interesting place if you chose it to be.
It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way
So, over at – or by – Nine Mile Point, in that no-man’s-land between Westwego and Bridge City, I observed something bizarre at Nine Mile Point Road.
What in the heck is this? Why is what looks like the MNSEW over here on the Gouldsboro Subdivision? Is Avondale or the mainlines west of it so clogged that the MNSEW had to move over to Westwego to wait for room ahead?
Check out this Wheeling & Lake Erie hood on this Conrail coil car.
This thing was shoving from Westwego back to Avondale.
This is actually not the first time that I have seen something like this happen; it’s actually the fourth or fifth time that I have seen it in the last few months, suggesting that it happens often.
Oh, well, that was interesting, on this entirely jpeg afternoon; yes, not a single frame was shot as a raw, and that’s all for pictures today. Yes, this isn’t the most inspiring of sets, but the next one will be better.
The News
Donovan’s Encounter With A Lying, Threatening Contractor
Wow, did you read about Donovan’s trackside encounter with a Verizon contractor who told him that taking pictures of trains was illegal? Read his story and my commentary with it, and let me know what you think! That’s some disturbingly stupid stuff, isn’t it? As I wrote there, the big problem seems to stem from a conflation of what is suspicious and what is illegal, the thought that something suspicious is, because it is suspicious, illegal. There is probably some evolutionary basis for what is too often a toxic human practice of assuming the worst in others.
Assuming the worst in others made sense for our ape ancestors, but in a supposedly civilized society, automatically assuming the worst in others has no place. Perhaps behind all of that is the mentality that that which is not understood should be prevented or prohibited; it is from this destructive mentality that societies have made certain consensual sexual acts or the consuming of certain products – even by adults – a crime, and a reason to deny people freedom.
Stand up for freedom! That includes freedom of thought.
All for now . . .
Jimbaux
