February 2009 Sampler

Greetings, and welcome to the February 2009 Sampler. I am pleased that you are here. This essay, showing one picture from each day in February 2009 that I took pictures worth sharing, includes some scenes that are different than the usual fare, though I have already published most of these images elsewhere.

I hope that you enjoyed the January 2009 Sampler, and I think that this February 2009 Sampler will be more interesting.

We will start on the Wednesday the 4th in East Harvey with a parked New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway train.

That might be only my second image of the ‘new’ GP38-3s on the NOGC, the first being the previous October.

The next day, Thursday 5 February 2009, was a very memorable day for me; it was the day that I said goodbye to trains on the Lockport Branch, and it was the day in which I took more pictures than I took on any other day of my life.

This was the second-to-last train to run on the Lockport Branch, and it was the first train on the branch in nearly one year.

The final railroad delivery was being made to Valentine Chemicals, a customer at the end of the branch, a customer that didn’t do enough railroad business to justify keeping 13 miles of railroad open after the main customer, the adjacent Valentine Paper, closed in December 2007.

A couple of months later, one final run was made on the branch to retrieve this tank car shown being delivered (the first car in this train is just a spacer car, along for the ride) in this image, but, since I was not alerted to this in time, I was not able to photograph it. For the picture that you see above, I had to burn a day off of the paid job thing to do it, and I felt the need to not disclose why I was taking off, especially just before a big work-related travel.

I took more than 1,200 pictures that day. I have never taken more pictures in one day, before or since. This high quantity of images stemmed not only from my being liberal with the picture taking due to the finality of the event that I was photographing but also that, due to the fact that this second-to-last run on the branch was also the first run on the branch in nearly a year, I got many images of crews of hi-rail trucks chipping out debris from crossings ahead of the train!

Sadly, I have no time to process all of these images, because time is money, and I have to waste away my time and talents in paid employment that either doesn’t need to be done specifically by me, doesn’t need to be done by a human being, or doesn’t need to be done at all, a situation that doesn’t need to exist.

If you would like to enable me to break free of this trap and finally fully focus on doing what I do best for the world, please consider becoming a patron of this publication – and, essentially, of me – by pledging to a monthly contribution of as little as $1 per month; you can set it up so that $1 per month goes from your credit card to my Patreon account.

Speaking of work-related travel, a few days later, on Monday the 9th, we are in Washington, DC, as we look west from the northern end of Capitol Hill along Constitution Avenue.

There is so much that I could say here, but I will leave it unsaid for now.

The next day, the 10th, we are farther north, well into Maryland, an interesting state, as we visit Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam National Battlefield.

There is so much that I could say here, but I will leave it unsaid for now.

The next day, the 11th, we are back on Capitol Hill.

What can you say?

The next day, the 12th, one week to the day after that last photographed run on the Lockport Branch, we are at the Custis-Lee Mansion at Arlington National Cemetery.

There is so much dramatic history tied up here. From the mansion that his wife’s family owned, Robert E. Lee would have been able to see the White House, which would have been visible in the above view during the time of the Civil War. Ponder that as you recall that Abraham Lincoln offered Lee command of the Union Army.

A century and two years later, another US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, came to this spot and marveled to a park employee that this was the most beautiful spot in all of Washington, that he could stay up here forever.

Since about six months later, that is where Kennedy’s remains lie.

Nine days later (from our February 2009 photo-Jimbaux chronology, not from 1963), we are back home in bayouland, before the eviction a decade later, catching a westbound BNSF Railway manifest train stopping to do some work at Schriever, as they do.

The next day, I catch. the eastbound Sunset Limited with a couple of private cars on the rear at Melodia before catching a Carnival parade nearby.

Yeah, I have done better.

Finally, on the 28th, the last day of the shortest month when it is the shortest that it is, my pal The Mid-City Marine was back in town, and we went foaming on the NS Back Belt.

That entire set is already published, and you can see it here.

That’s all.

Merci,

Jim