by admin on 2015/05/16
Jimbaux is still alive.
[This essay was written in May of 2015 shortly after these images were made and is being reposted here because the original article published then was destroyed in a website crash in 2017. What is presented here is the same essay, saved by Wayback Machine, with only the slightest of editing of style and content.]
Hi.
Obligatory May Posting
So, I took out the camera and took my first SLR-camera pictures in two months and two days. I freely admit that I am going through the motions right now and took pictures today largely to avoid having no postings this month, and to avoid doing a post of old slides and recent cell-phone pictures that I would have otherwise done and that I can now postpone until next month. Despite that expectation-lowering disclaimer, the good news is that all of the scenes from this brief set are new shots! One of them will look very familiar, but it is enough of a variation on an old theme that I am calling it a new shot, except that it is not a new shot for the train’s location.
I had thought about going to Hattiesburg to see and photograph the funeral procession for Officer Liquori Tate, killed by gunfire one week earlier in the line of duty, but poor weather, fatigue, and other factors precluded my embarkation on such a mission.
Saving The Best For First
Sadly, the best shot of the day is the first one. It goes downhill after this. This is a shot that I did for the first time nearly a year ago, but today’s shot – the second time that I do it – is the first time that I publish this view.
Here, seen from the Franklin Avenue overpass that you see in so many of my shots from Terminal Junction, is an NS yard job pulling out of Oliver Yard (unseen at right) onto the Freight Lead at/along the end of the Back Belt.
I left before seeing what happened next, but I have no reason to think that the job did not shove right back into the yard afterward. Check out that loaded bar car! Those things are neat. I’m guessing that the empty bulkhead flatcars came off of the KCS from a customer near Gramercy, but I am not sure. That is the Almonaster Avenue overpass in the background.
Different Enough To Be Different, Same Enough To Be Recognizable
There was a BNSF-to-CSX manifest train with one locomotive and 35 cars, and I caught it on the CSX before Gentilly Yard (as regular readers know, I almost never go to Gentilly Yard, much less east of it.)
Since the lighting was poor, and since I did not care, I decided (and, in another way, cared enough) to do something different.
Yeah, it looks familiar, but it is different; it’s the first time I do this view at ground level from the neutral ground.
Now, let me relocate and get another view of this thing.
Okay, let’s see a cropped version of this image.
Okay, that’s enough for this train.
While I Am Here
There was a unit loaded crude oil train in the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad’s France Yard that would follow this train (seen above) into Gentilly Yard. So, I decided to stick around and wait.
Come on, Mitch; get that cleaned!
Since I am here, since the lighting is poor, and since I do not like crude oil trains, I did a new shot, one that is completely different, one that does not show much of the train, which does not bother me for reasons mentioned at the beginning of this sentence.
Here we see the front of the train (with its NOPB crew) coming northward through the flood gate at France Yard before it takes a 90 degree turn to the east to cross the Inner-Harbor Navigational Canal and arrive at the crude oil terminal.
The CSX mainlines are in the foreground (our BNSF-to-CSX train seen earlier passed there), and crossing it is an NOPB branchline up the western bank of the canal; on the last day that I took train pictures, the main subject was an NOPB job on this branchline.
Note, please, that in the above picture, the diamond in the foreground is in focus, whereas in the below picture, the train is in focus.
The train then had to stop for a few minutes for the canal drawbridge to position for railroad traffic.
That’s all for pictures today. I went sit by Bayou St. John and saw a couple of trains – a CSX-to-UP manifest, and the AARWX – and was delighted to be visited by K’Yat, and then I went home.
Beaucoup Que Decir, Tempus Fegit
I have plenty to say, just not the enthusiasm to exert the effort to synthesize it into paragraphs and type it all.
There is so much that I want to say on the recent topics of excessive police force, protests, riots, racism, etc. I will just say one thing for now. If you are deeply bothered by what seems to be disrespect for police officers, then that right there is precisely a reason that you should take allegations of police brutality seriously! If having police be respected is really important to you (and it is important to me), then that is that much more reason why you should work to make sure that there are no valid reasons to reflexively disrespect police. Just automatically dismissing the allegations will only mean that more such terrible incidents between citizens and police will continue to occur.
Instead of criticizing people for disrespecting authority, a criticism that will not succeed in getting people to change their behavior, work to build a world, a system, in which authority is respectable; that means, among other things, building a system that is itself respectful.
That is all for now.
JBX
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
John May 22, 2015 at 11:11
Do you have any photos of that train that got blown off the bridge ?
Kurt May 22, 2015 at 14:33
John,
I was able to get some shots of it. It was cleaned up that night, I made my way over around 5pm
They are towards the bottom of the album.
Thanks,
Kurt
