Revelation Day

Today was a really difficult day. All that I will say about the difficulty is that I learned today of the Melbourne-Evans Collision and my personal connection to it, and I can tell you that trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a real thing.

The pictures that I took today, Tuesday 2 February 2021, were made on my way to a meeting about this.

I wanted to again get, as I did on January 15, some shots of the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s BR Job. I got to American Blvd – it’s not a boulevard – well after 08:00, and the locomotives were there, parked, but the crew was not there.

I wondered if there was some holiday or some problem of which I was unaware.

I paced around a bit and read.

Perhaps the delay was just some sort of meeting that the crew had to attend, but the crew showed up before 10:00 and started working.

That hopper car is apparently for some relatively new customer behind the paper place.

Early-morning lighting closer to the summer solstice might be better for these views, but this may be about as good as it gets here.

It’s the LDRR 1850, the locomotive that has spent so much time in Schriever over the last almost-quarter-of-a-century, doing the work with the LDRR 1717 attached to it.

The boxcars here aren’t as cool as the boxcars that would have been here 20 years ago, but that’s just the state of modern boxcardom.

This is a good view.

Standing here on this tight road, though, is not all that fun and relaxing.

Okay, but I am actually already starting to get tired of this.

Now, we see a different view as the front of the train is much closer to the camera.

This is how it is at American Blvd.

For some reason, the last boxcar there was left here, hence the reason for the brake stick.

I don’t understand!

Over by the mainline, I was told that the train would be going to the salt mine, which I liked, but I had to get to Lake Charles for the meeting and, so, I worried that the train would go to the salt mine too late for me to photograph it on the Breaux Bridge Branch.

So, here, by the mainline, is some switching being done at Elks.

I had never photographed at this location prior to today.

I guess that I wasn’t missing much.

I’m not super excited to be doing this again.

Here we are back at whatever the name of this track his at Southpark Road.

The crew is building its train for the Breaux Bridge Branch.

Gosh, the graffiti is so damned terrible.

Running up against the limit of time that I had today to devote to foaming, I got set up at the corner of Sophie Street and Division Street, just east of US Highway 90, for what I knew would be the final stand today.

Here, more than an hour after the above image was made, is our train on the Breaux Bridge Branch.

The boxcars are going to the salt mine, and the tank cars are to be put in the runaround track near the salt mine.

This line once went all the way to the Mississippi River across from Baton Rouge, where a rail ferry allowed the Southern Pacific to interchange with the Illinois Central Railroad.

The LDRR 1850 is leading, and the LDRR 1717 is trailing.

That’s all for the pictures today.

I got on I-10 west in Lafayette from Highway 90, probably the first time that I do that in more than a decade, and proceeded westward. I exited on Highway 13 in Crowley to go via Highway 100 through Egan, the first time that I take that route and go through that town. It was a cute, it looked really nice, a pastoral location, except that the Trump flags made me feel very unwelcome.

I got back on I-10 west of Egan, and, later, I exited off of I-10 On to Highway 165 at Iowa and then came west on Highway 90. There was a westbound manifest train that I saw, and I got ahead of it, thinking I would be able to beat it to a shot at Highway 397, but I was not able to do that. I have never gotten a picture at Highway 397, and I thought that today, with what it means with the revelations that I would hear today, would be the appropriate day to do that shot finally for the first time! But it was not to be.

The train had about nine or ten loaded centerbeam flatcars at the front, and then it was just about as many LPG tank cars. So, it must have been some sort of the local train, maybe from Kinder. I would like that train. It had two locomotives running elephant style. The first was a fairly clean UP locomotive, and the second was a blue CSX locomotive.

There were eight hopper cars, most of them badly tagged, at the Farmers Rice Milling Company. There were several hopper cars here on the port track south of the rice mill, and it looks like there’s a new load out or something.

I arrived at 14:33 for the meeting which was difficult and cathartic.

I hope to get some pictures of the Port Rail job soon.

That’s all for now.

Jim