Greetings, and welcome to the December 2014 Sampler essay, which, obviously, follows chronologically from the “November 2014 Sampler” essay that has more images than this essay shows.
Something Different
This one will be brief, as I took SLR-camera pictures on only four days in the month of December 2014, and all of them share a common theme of subject area, one that I have not commonly shown. By that month, the classes that I had been taking in New Orleans all year had ended, I had taken final exams, I was about to graduate, I had just started a new job back in October, and I was about to have a major spinal-fusion surgery.
All four of the images in this sampler essay are from the Canadian National Railway’s obscure extended branchline to Bogalusa, Louisiana, on what remains of the former Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad mainline that ceased to be a through route on the day that the Illinois Central Railroad’s purchase of the GM&O was approved in 1972. At this time, CN ran train L579 seven days per week out of Bogalusa to Ferguson, Mississippi, and back, and most of the images that I made this month were of that train.
The proximate motivation for focusing on the Bogalusa line at this time of December 2014 was that news had recently broken that a WATCo operation was taking over the operations of switching the mills and building the trains in Bogalusa itself, even though CN would still run the road train into and out of Bogalusa, and I suspected that it would be only a matter of time before WATCo took over operation of the entire line. Fortunately, at the time of the writing of this essay nearly a decade later, that has not happened, but I am still very glad that I made this trip, especially since I haven’t been back there since then and since boxcars have gotten even worse since then. Wow, how is that for the word “since” four times in one clause?
My pictures from this area in this month were made on two trips, one of which was a day trip on the 7th and the other of which was on a trip on which I spent two nights in a hotel in Bogalusa and ate plenty of unhealthy food – including from Ward’s! – in the process. It’s the only time that I have stayed in a hotel in Bogalusa or anywhere near Bogalusa, it was the first time since June 2008 that I spent a night in a Louisiana hotel for purposes of my railroad enthusiasm hobby, and it was the first time since April 2012 that I spent a night in a hotel anywhere for purposes of my railroad enthusiasm hobby. It is also, as of the time of the writing and publication of this essay a decade after these pictures were made, the last time that I spent a night in a hotel anywhere for purposes of my railroad enthusiasm hobby.
Since the images presented here are, at least at the time of this writing in late 2024, of my last forays along the Bogalusa Line, since I didn’t have many such visits before December 2014, and since I think that this is a neat line that warrants its own focus, I will just list and link to the pictures from my three prior visits here, as it will make this page a directory for all of my yet-published pictures from this line.
- 2008 December 29 – my first visit to the area, when the only moving train that I saw was the mill switcher
- 2009 January 31 – when I photographed a moving train north of town, the first time that I see and get an image of the turn
- 2014 January 11 – the first time that I chased a train the full length of the line, a day on which I took so many images that I had to break up the later images into a second blog article
So, the trip that I made on the 7th of this month was my fourth visit to the line, the three days that I spent on the line a week later constituted my fifth visit to the line, and, since only one of the visits to the line prior to this month – the one earlier that same year, when I chased the train all the way from Bogalusa to its turnaround point at Ferguson – had me seeing, chasing, and photographing action far out of Bogalusa, my second chase of a train on the length of the line to Ferguson was on the 13th, with the feat repeated on each of the subsequent days.
The Pictures
For only the first of these four days did I make a blog article at the time, for the number of pictures on the other three days were too numerous, especially since my surgery was on the 17th, to blog at the time, and they still, a decade later as this is being written, remain unprocessed and unpublished.
Sunday, The 7th
The mood was somber on this day, and not only because the only action that I caught was a single locomotive – no cars – returning to town from the north in the darkness. The world had awoken to the news that Republican Bill Cassidy had defeated incumbent US Senator Democrat Mary Landrieu in the US Senate race.
It would be nice if there were some railroad activities at that park, but it probably would be some plasticky hopper-car stuff or tank-car stuff. At least, however, it would give this line that relies on one paper mill for existence some other sources of life.
Saturday, The 13th
On this first day of the trip, I was coming from home and saw and photographed a parked Kansas City Southern Railway ballast train at Gramercy.
I first went to Ferguson. Somehow, I don’t remember how, I gleaned that the Ferguson Turn from Bogalusa, CN train L579, had not yet arrived, and I first intercepted it at Monticello, Mississippi, northbound.
I had sat there a while and waited, while reading a book from Dave Ramsey that I never finished reading and may have stopped reading on this day.
That night was my first of two nights in the Bogalusa hotel.
Sunday, The 14th
On this day, I awoke in Bogalusa and chased the train from Bogalusa to Ferguson and back and then went to sleep in Bogalusa.
That is the northbound train crossing the Fair River at Rosella, Mississippi, not long before it makes the turn at Wanilla to go to Ferguson.
Yeah, CN’s use of yellow reflective tape really bothers me, because it destroys the balance of its otherwise great locomotive paint scheme, hence why I removed the yellow tape from the picture. It should use white reflective tape like the Norfolk Southern Railway and the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited railroad do.
Monday, The 15th
On this day, I again awoke in Bogalusa, chased the train to Ferguson, and then chased it back to Bogalusa. On the way southward, I caught the southbound turn with the three centerbeam cars at the front end, which would be set out at Miles Lumber.
That was a great trip! I am glad that I did it. A decade later, I still haven’t digested all of the images from the trip.
Epilogue
Two days later, I had major surgery and didn’t leave the hospital until, I think, the 19th, if not later
My next SLR-camera pictures – and my first made while having hardware in my back – were on 2015 January 6, when I made my second chase of a train on the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s Abbeville Branch (my first chase of a train there was in January 2012), which became dormant a little bit more than five years later when the Planters Rice Mill closed; so, I am very glad that I made this January 2015 trip there, as my next chase on the branch was not until late 2016 when traffic levels were getting quite grim. The next day, after I got a few railroad images in Lafayette and a few railroad images in New Iberia, I got my first pictures on the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s Cypremort Branch, a disturbing place.
After those two days in the first week of January, I took very few SLR-camera pictures for the rest of the year and no railroad pictures after September 5, and the number of SLR-camera pictures that I took in 2015 prior to January 8 is greater than the number of pictures that I took in 2015 after 2015. My picture-taking didn’t really pick up again until late 2016.
Therefore, the pictures that I took this month, December 2014, were an out-of-the-way grand finale of a picture-taking renaissance that began on Saturday 2 November 2013 after my last grandparent died and two-and-a-half months before I started school in New Orleans, when the picture-taking became more frequent in March, and this grand-finale was followed by an also-out-of-the-way encore or otherwise difficult to place pair of pictures a few weeks later in early January 2015.
Such is life, and all of the weird, changing seasons of life.
Jbx
