The End Of The Beginning Of My Digital Era
For me, every month in the second half of 2005 was a memorable month. That was true for November, it was true for December, too, and the reason that December was memorable is that of plenty of railroad photography in that holy time at the end of the year, with time off from work during times of low-angle sunlight, my first year of digital SLR-camera photography, and my first year with a residence and a job in the metropolitan New Orleans area.
All images in this essay were made in southeastern Louisiana, and featured prominently this month is activity on the Louisiana & Delta Railroad’s Lockport Branch, which has been dormant since the spring of 2009, and the New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway in and near Gretna.
I should mention that there was something wrong with my software for more than a year after I went digital, a problem that meant that, even though I usually was shooting in RAW mode on the camera, practically all of the images were saved as jpegs, very much limiting the quality of presented images. So, practically all of my digital images from prior to the last week of October 2006 were, unfortunately, saved as jpegs.
Since this is the last month of the year, the year that I “went digital,” I should share links to all of the 2005 sampler essays here, though I should say now that the August and September ones are rather insipid; I say that because I don’t want what you see when you open on them to discourage you from opening the October or November ones or from viewing the array of images in this essay.
I went digital! I also went to the Northeast!
I was still in the Northeast, about to start a new job, and, then, Hurricane Katrina happened.
Because of Hurricane Katrina, I was in California.
This was when I started getting some good Louisiana train pictures and also went to Rich Mountain and got good pictures there.
I really like this set of images, as it is full of neat things that no longer exist, at least not in the forms seen in the images shown there.
Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk about December 2005!
For me and my railroad photography, the month of December 2005 was essentially a digital and more New-Orleans-ish version of December 2003, with me making an especially-large quantity of pictures of activity close to home during the two weeks that I had off of work for Christmas and New Year’s Day. I would very much like for you to go to the “December 2003 Images” blog article and read the eight-paragraph explanation for this pattern of behavior of intense railroad photography around the winter solstice, because it’s very important to me! It will very much help you understand what you see in this essay, because it explains the frame of mind behind the taking of the pictures.
With that understood as context, we shall get right to the pictures now!
Saturday, The 3rd
CTC Live Oak Junction had just become my go-to place for morning railroad action, particularly given that much of New Orleans was still a scary wasteland from Hurricane Katrina.
On this morning at 08:26, UP 9033 lead a train that traced as YAV17-03 through the junction.
At 09:38, the MLIAV-02, led by CSXT 8869, came through.
I guess that that was a satisfying morning.
Sunday, The 4th
On this Sunday morning, I was at sacred Schriever, having a Sunday sermon, and, there, I saw a rather old and rare relic.
I think that this is the only car in Great Northern Blue that I have ever seen.
Saturday, The 10th
Here I was back at Live Oak for a second consecutive Saturday. At 08:38 CST, I photographed Union Pacific Railroad train QLINSB-10 coming southbound on the Livonia Subdivision, and, then, at 09:30, I photographed BNSF Railway train M-LALNWO1-10 coming eastbound off of the Lafayette Subdivision.
This is one of the few – and it may be the only – time that I photographed an eastbound train that wasn’t the UP local train or the eastbound Sunset Limited coming off of the Lafayette Subdivision at this spot.
Sunday, The 11th
This was the date of the annual Joyous Sounds Christmas concert. I took several pictures there, but I shalln’t share any of them here.
Sunday, The 18th
On this date, the two-week holiday from work/school was in the process of beginning; I say “in the process of” because I didn’t normally go to work on Sunday anyway, meaning that, even though I left work Friday afternoon, the holiday doesn’t really start Monday morning until I am doing something other than what I normally do on Monday morning.
On this Sunday at 13:34, I photographed Union Pacific Railroad train MNOHO westbound, led by UP 7881, at Chacahoula. At 14:10 at Fourth Street in Morgan City, I photographed it again.
I think that it had stopped to wait for the Berwick Bay Bridge to line and lock for railroad traffic and was just beginning to accelerate from a stop when I made that picture.
Monday, The 19th
So, as I wrote in the opening paragraphs of that vicennial retrospective December 2003 piece that I hope that you read, one of several factors in my habit of spending nearly the entirety of daylight hours during the two-week Christmas-New-Year holiday – except for most of Christmas Eve, all of Christmas Day, and most of New Year’s day – out by the track trying to get pictures of trains is my affinity for branchline and local trains that usually run only on weekdays.
Such was the case with the Lockport Branch, a former Southern Pacific railroad branch extending about 13-14 miles down the eastern bank of Bayou Lafourche from Raceland. By this date and all throughout the time that I documented activity there, there were only two customers remaining on the line, both at the end of the line in Valentine. One of them was Valentine Paper, a paper finishing plant, and the other was Valentine Chemical, which occupied the site of the former Valentine Sugar mill that closed in about 1979 and was the reason that the branch was built that far south down the bayou.
Moreover, Valentine Paper was built originally (I think in the 1950s) as a way to try to make paper products from the bagasse – the byproduct of the milling of sugar – produced by the adjacent sugar mill. Apparently, this idea didn’t work out, but the paper plant stayed operating for almost three decades after the sugar mill closed, using recycled paper, mostly paper from mills across the continent that were rejected or mistakes in their own production processes.
The result is that this wasn’t a paper mill with the usual inbound loads of pulpwood or woodchips and outbound loads of paper, and I don’t remember exhaust stacks spewing steam and-or smoke like you see on a normal paper mill. Other than in extreme rare cases, all of the inbound cars were loaded, and all of the outbound cars were empty; for the boxcars, this is the opposite of a normal paper mill. As a result, the boxcars that arrived onto the branch came from a variety of railroads around the United States and Canada, making for rather interesting-looking trains.
So, on this date, I was able to chase the Louisiana & Delta Railroad train on the Lockport Branch, the first time since at least June that I was able to chase a train on this branch that usually was served on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
At 09:45, I photographed the train, train SC1 with LDRR 1850 pulling three loaded boxcars, southbound at Myrtle Drive in Lockport, as seen here.
This raises the question about why I didn’t take any pictures of Lockport Branch activity in my week off in Thanksgiving week in the previous month. The short answer is that the branch was not served at all during that week, but the broader answer is that the paper plant had been in danger of closing. At around that time, it was acquired by a firm called Dunn Paper. By Christmas week, production had resumed to the point that we started to see trains that looked like those that we had seen in years past.
It was not to last, though. Apparently, Dunn Paper bought Valentine Paper for the purpose of learning its process so that it could implement that process at its existing mills in the North.
Two years after these images were made, Valentine Paper closed for the final time. Less than two years after these images were made, the last-ever railroad delivery to Valentine Paper was made, and I was fortunate enough to be able to photograph it. After the closure of Valentine Paper, L&D served Valentine Chemical directly for a little bit more than a year, but this practice was financially unsustainable, and the last runs on the branch were made in the first few months of 2019; I didn’t catch the last run, but I caught the second-to-last run.
A family function that I attended in Houma is the reason that I didn’t chase the train back north from Valentine on this date; attending this family function that put me back in Schriever in time to see the westbound Amtrak Sunset Limited meet an eastbound BNSF Railway ballast train.
So much about those days was so much better!
Tuesday, The 20th
Back in Whoadieville on this date, thinking that I’d be back on the Lockport Branch the next day, I got several railroad pictures on the West Bank, including in some places that I had not photographed before.
I got some pictures of New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway action, and it should be noted that, only with occasional exceptions, the NOGC is a weekday-operations-only railroad, meaning that, aside from whatever I was able to theretofore get after I would get off of work, this was the first time that I was able to see and photograph some of the NOGC’s moves. As with the Lockport Branch both the previous day and the following day, some of these images could be made only when I was normally at work.
At 11:52, I photographed an NOGC job with NOGC 501 and NOGC 507 as power shoving a loaded pipe gondola into industry spur at Fort St. Leon.
At 12:06, I photographed the same job moving northward through Terrytown.
This was the first time that I photographed a train in Terrytown.
At 14:36 CST, I photographed NOGC 1038 leading a westbound New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway train on 4th Street at Newton Street in Gretna. At 15:33 CST, I photographed a solid set of Conrail locomotives at the western end of a cut of cars at Union Pacific Railroad’s Avondale Yard at Avondale Garden Road.
Wednesday, The 21st
On this date, I awoke in Harvey and was then back on the Lockport Branch. I already explained the significance of this branch and why this was the time of year that I photographed action on it so much in the section for The 19th.
This date started out rainy where I was, but clouds cleared by the time that I arrived in Valentine. Even though I was technically off of work for two weeks, I had to spend some time working on a fundraiser for a trip with some students to Washington, DC.
I chased the train back to Raceland, and the shot that I am choosing to present here was made at 13:48 at Farm To Market Road in Mathews.
I love it. I love the Ontario Northland Railway boxcars. I love the brevity of the train that allows us to see the entire thing even in a broadside view. That is a classic branchline broadside shot, and, to the degree that it has a soundtrack at all, I hear “Who’ll Stop The Rain” by Credence Clearwater Revival or something like it when I see this scene, even though, as my essay on my 2003 December 23 chase of the Lockport Branch train describes, I think of the Incubus song “The Warmth” when I think of the Lockport Branch.
Just east of the Louisiana DOTD yard at 14:09, I got my camera just a few inches above the ground to shoot a broadside view across a harvested sugarcane field, which allowed me to see and show the sky underneath the bodies of the boxcars!
Later that afternoon, just before dusk, I made a glint shot at Schriever at 16:29 of BNSF Railway train M-LALNWO – Lafayette, Louisiana, to New Orleans Public Belt Railroad’s Cotton Warehouse Yard – eastbound at Horseshoe Road.
Thursday, the 22nd
I got plenty of neat pictures on this date! I awoke at home and hunted trains in bayouland briefly as I made my way back to Whoadieville.
I wonder what and where I ate on this morning.
At 08:49, I bagged L&D train SC1, with LDRR 1850 as power, moving westbound at Chacahoula on its way to Morgan City. At 09:13, I photographed cars, including the three boxcars pulled from Valentine Paper the day before, for the Union Pacific Railroad to pick up at Raceland Junction. At 09:49, I photographed UP train Q-LINSB moving eastbound at CTC Live Oak Junction. At 11:05, I photographed the LLS51, the Chip Local, with UP 1353 as power, westbound at Willswood Road in Waggaman.
I don’t know what I did for the three and a half hours between the time I would have been able to get back to the pad and the time that I went to get the next pictures, but, at 15:08, as seen in this image, I photographed NOGC 1036 and NOGC 1039 leading an empty New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway grain train northbound on Madison Street in Gretna.
Because of length constraints at Gouldsboro Yard, particularly the fact that the southern switch to the New Orleans & Lower Coast track is in about the midpoint of the yard at McDonough Street, unit grain trains have to “double over” or “saw by” with two crews and two power sets when moving through Gouldsboro Yard, which is to say that the train has to be cut in two and have each part move through the yard separately, then be put together to leave on the other track.
That is why it wasn’t until more than 45 minutes later that I saw the train with UP locomotives leading it on Fourth Street just two miles west of here.
I spent this night in the pad like a good whoadie, but the plan for the next day was to head back home to the bayou.
Friday, The 23rd
On this date I went to The Han to visit some family members whom I thought at the time were good people. A couple of them may have been, as they died before the Trump Era, but the Trump Era revealed one of them to be an awful human being, as it revealed tens of millions of people to be awful human beings. Such is this awful society in which we live.
Later, I was back in New Orleans, though that was strange, since I was to head west again and spend the night at home in bayouland again.
At 16:47, I caught Amtrak’s eastbound Sunset Limited moving eastbound at Horseshoe Road, a mile before its station stop at Schriever. Here is the going-away shot at 16:48.
I got some night shots at the depot later that day.
Saturday, The 24th
It was Christmas Eve, and my truck was covered in mud from the Lockport Branch chase from a few days before.
I read on the Yahoo Groups about an eastbound BNSF Railway coal train on the Lafayette Subdivision. So, at 12:35 CST, I found him and made this shot at Deadwood Road in Donner.
Later, at 15:36, I shot a neat-looking UP train MNOHO led by CSXT 8120 passing through Schriever.
Sunday, The 25th
It is Christmas Day. At 11:21, I made this picture on the Ue Ue property.
At 16:40, I photographed LDRR 1850 on the old locomotive tie-up track in Schriever.
Monday, The 26th
On this date, LCK wrote to me to say “The KCS is the place to be these days. I’ve really been in the KCS mood anyway. What are you doing New Years Eve/Day? I know I sound like a socially inept, loser foamer, but would you want to go to Vicksburg with me then? I _may_ go back then, as it will likely be my last chance before moving to [redacted]. It’s such a cool area.”
That is a pretty revealing statement, especially as I now see, in the wake of the dissolution of our friendship about which I learned in September 2024, he and I were mirrors to each other.
I wrote him back that evening to tell him that, among other things, I had too much to do to accompany him on such a trip. I was focused on the Lockport Branch and had plans with the lady friend in New Orleans.
I also told him about an unfortunate and costly mistake that I had made on this date on my second out-of-town outing of the day.
First, I went to Donaldsonville, apparently, in hopes of catching the Acadiana Railway serving what remained of the Texas & Pacific Railway branch to Thibodaux. At 10:53 at Lula Road in Belle Rose, I photographed AKDN 1503 parked on what remained of the old Texas & Pacific Railway branch to Thibodaux.
At 11:10, I photographed UP 3321, UP 3323, UP 2948, and other locomotives on the locomotive track at Nolan Street in Donaldsonville.
You might recall that I visited here in mid-October.
Then, I specifically photographed UP 114 in that set of locomotives. It’s a former Missouri Pacific Railroad GE B23-7, and I am fond of those things.
A few minutes later at 11:20, I photographed a northbound Union Pacific Railroad train on the UP Livonia Subdivision at Brock Road in Saint James.
I don’t know if I stopped at home on the way there, but, at 13:31 CST, I photographed Amtrak’s westbound Sunset Limited westbound slowing for a station stop Schriever.
I chased the train to Berwick, where I photographed it and a BNSF Railway train and also made a costly mistake.
As I was driving back home, about 10 miles east of Berwick, I realized that the scanner had been quiet ever since I left Berwick. So, I reached for it.
I could not find it! Panic! I doubled-back to Berwick and looked all over the place, but I couldn’t find it. I even talked to a law-enforcement officer in the area. I am not sure what happened, but I think that I left the scanner on top of my truck and then forgot that it was there. It was my first scanner, and I would not be able to listen to railroad radio again for a few months.
I am not sure, but I think that I slept at the pad on this night.
Tuesday, the 27th
This was a day that I devoted almost entirely to chasing and photographing trains of the New Orleans & Gulf Coast Railway. That I had lost my scanner would not impede me in this goal, since the scanner never was helpful for this shortline on which trains move at 10 miles per hour.
Specifically, I got a hat trick of street-running shots on this date, photographing the southbound street-running on Madison Street in the morning and the two westbound street-running runs on Fourth Street in the afternoon. I also learned plenty about NOGC operations on this date.
I say “almost entirely” at the beginning of the prior paragraph because, after photographing the NOGC power cranking up for the day in West Harvey at Destrehan Avenue at 08:38, I made a quick run to Avondale and Livonia. I did get a rather lousy picture of a parked train at Live Oak, but the reason that I went as far west as Avondale is that I wanted a peek at UP’s Morgan City local train (the LLS51) so that I could see if it had any Lockport cars. It did, five boxcars to be specific. One car was a British Columbia Railway car! Another was CN, and another was GTW but with the URL for CN’s website painted on it. So, these would be set out at Raceland on this night, and I think that I knew where I would be the next day! We’ll get to that, though, and it will be busy enough, as you will see.
At 10:40, I photographed NOGC 507 and NOGC 501 pulling an NOGC train along Madison Street in Gretna, bound for Belle Chasse. This shot wasn’t the first-ever train that I photographed on Madison Street, but they were my first frontally-lit telephoto images on Madison Street and my first images of a southbound train on Madison Street, the former being mostly a function of the latter. I chased this 16-car train to Belle Chasse, the first time – and, as I write this two decades later, still about the only time – that I chase a train from Gretna to Belle Chasse.
The image from this date that I will show here in this “sampler” piece is from the middle of the three street-running catches, as, at 12:14, we see NOGC 1039 and another locomotive (almost certainly NOGC 1036) pull 19 cars westbound on Fourth Street.
The last three cars of the train were gondola cars, one of which was a Chicago & Northwestern Railway gondola car! Perhaps they were coming from the pipe distributor at Fort St Leon.
About 90 minutes later, I was back at roughly the same spot for the second westbound train of the afternoon – and likely of the entire day – down 4th Street, with NOLR 2180 and NOGC 500 as power.
I figured out that this second train is the “local” train – which is a funny thing to say, since all trains on shortlines like this one are locals. However, the term is still instructive because “local” is a relative term. The earlier westbound went straight through from Gouldsboro to UP interchange in Westwego, whereas this second train would stop at local industries – mostly or even entirely Kinder-Morgan in Harvey – between those two points to do work; so, it’s likely that all of the cars in the second train were bound for being spotted at an industry east in or east of Westwego this afternoon. Because of the direction of the switches, it made more sense for the NOGC to drag all of its inbound carload traffic to Gouldsboro Yard and sort it there, even if some of those cars would come right back west the same day without being loaded or unloaded. (I don’t know if this still happens, since I don’t know the purpose of the new yard in Westwego-Marrero – called, weirdly enough, “Harvey Yard” – and if it now sorts inbound traffic.)
That is three trains doing street-running in Gretna on one day; I don’t know of any other time that I did the hat-trick of photographing three trains doing street-running in one day.
Next, I went to Harvey and photographed this train setting up to work at the Kinder-Morgan tank farm.
Wednesday, the 28th
On this date, I would, for the third and final time of this end-of-2005 holiday, see and photograph a train moving to-and-or-from Valentine on the Lockport Branch.
I started the day in Harvey, seem to have gone to the Jerry’s restaurant by school, stopped at Live Oak and photographed a couple of trains there, and chased the L&D job into Raceland from the east. Apparently, I had known that the L&D’s Schriever Job – train SC1 – had to go to Monsanto in Boutte before working in Raceland and Lockport, which explains my lack of a hurry to get there early. The train arrived in Raceland after 11:00.
I should mention that I think that all of the track in Raceland other than the mainline and the siding are technically considered part of the Lockport Branch and that, despite that, colloquially, I consider only the part of the branch past the industry track in Raceland to be the Lockport Branch. Ever since about April of 2009 when the last train to Valentine ran, the track just south of a spot just north of the Louisiana Highway 182 crossing has been closed, and I think that the chances that it ever will be reopened are very small. That stub of still-open track between the highway crossing and the switch at the beginning of what I call the branch is, since the closure of the branch beyond it, used to store overflow cars.
However, many others would call the industry track that is still active in Raceland today part of “the Lockport Branch”. I don’t.
At about 12:21 CST, Willie Neal Jr. of Louisiana & Delta Railroad train SC1 rode loaded CN 625540 to spot for Dufrene Building Material at Mississippi Street.
At 13:03, train SC1 was moving Valentine-bound with LDRR 1850 pulling five boxcars to Valentine Paper at North Third Street. Those were the boxcars that I saw – and had sought – in Avondale yesterday and that the UP local had apparently delivered here the previous afternoon. Three of the five boxcars in today’s train are CN family cars, but I am disappointed that they are defiled with graffiti; of the other two boxcars, one was a Norfolk Southern Railway boxcar, and the other was a CSX boxcar.
I chased the Valentine-bound train of five boxcars from Raceland to Valentine. The return trip northbound had four cars, all boxcars. The one image from many of this day that I am sharing is this one made of the northbound run at 15:34 at Vizard Road and Clotilda Plantation.
I love the classic rural branchline scene! It keeps becoming even more rare, as I knew then that it would, since that trend already was well established at the time.
December 28 has, like many days around the winter solstice, traditionally been a very active time for me to be taking pictures for reasons that I mentioned in that “December 2003 Images essay”; one year to the day after I took today’s images, I returned to Mexico, and two years to the day after I took these images, I visited and photographed the Shiloh battlefield in Tennessee and photographed some railroad action in northeastern Mississippi; 13 years to the day after I took today’s images, I chased a train pulled by the same locomotive that pulled today’s train on the Lockport Branch, the LDRR 1850, down the Abbeville Branch, which, too, has since closed; 15 years to the day after I took today’s images, I made my first images of action on Port Rail, the railroad serving the Port Of Lake Charles.
The Lockport Branch was – and still is – such a special place for me, so explanatory of my love of or obsession with trains.
Thursday, the 29th
On this date, I photographed only one train, and it is one of my favorite shots that I’ve done on the NOGC, I think partly because I like that grey Qwest paint scheme.
One of NOGC’s GP7s, the 504, had previously worked on the Qwest train and still wore its grey paint scheme (minus the word Qwest) from that time of laying fiber-optic cables; I had seen and photographed – on black-and-white film with my father’s old 1960s Pentax camera – that train when it was based in Schriever in 1999 and thus had a sentimental attachment to it. So, when the GP7s left the NOGC for the final time in early 2013, the 504 was the one that I was saddest to see go (though the page with the set of pictures linked earlier in this sentence does not show the 504.)
Remember that, as explained in detail in the “December 2003 Images” essay, this was a time of the year that I took plenty of photographs, and the pictures from this date are the first of at least four consecutive sets of December 29 pictures for me; one year to the day after I took these pictures, I got a good set of pictures – many of them train pictures – on my first full day back in Mexico; two years to the day after I took these pictures, I got several pictures in central Mississippi and in Hammond, Louisiana; three years to the day after I took these pictures, I visited for the first time the Bogalusa line of the former Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad and got some action pictures there; four years to the day after I took these pictures, I got some pictures in and near Monterrey; five years to the day after I took these images, I shot the Chip Local train at CTC Live Oak.
Anyway, here, at 15:17 on this date, is our train, about to cross Lavoisier Street.
I like how the greyness of the locomotive is interplaying with the yellowness of the tree leaves, but I think that the parked-against-traffic minivan, too, helps.
I would return to bayouland that night for reasons that should be clear by now!
Friday, the 30th
So, at least theoretically, this date was my last chance to photograph Lockport Branch action for the Christmas holiday and, as such, probably for a long time.
It was not to be. While the SC1 did go to Raceland to do work there on this date, it did not go to Valentine. There were three loaded boxcars to be brought to Valentine Paper (two of them CN), but Valentine Paper had only unloaded two or three of the five cars that were brought to it Wednesday, and Valentine Paper told the L&D to just wait until Monday – when I would return to my day job from the holiday break – to serve it. Dammit! I was also told that many more boxcars would be coming, but I wouldn’t get to see any of this.
I was very disappointed. As it eventuated, the next time that I would see and photograph action on the Lockport Branch would not be until the next August. Indeed, if my count is correct, in the slightly-less-than two years that Valentine Paper remained open after this date, I would see and photograph trains to-and-or from it on only four more dates after the three dates on which I saw and photographed trains to-and-or-from it in December 2005.
What I was able to see and photograph on the non-mainline, non-siding trackage at the beginning of the Lockport Branch was the SC1 picking up the by-then empty CN centerbeam flatcar at the end of the Proper track.
What do I do now? I, too, am a socially-inept foamer, just like LCK, who went off the deep end in the 2020s; so, all that I could do was all that I could do, and all that I could do was photograph the Chip Local train, a fact that, in retrospect, had some meaning.
Here it is on the way out of Schriever at 13:44, with Chip Ledet in the conductor’s seat of HLCX 3802.
I would photograph it again at Chacahoula at 13:53.
There is another metaphor here that explains my development as a railroad photographer. Note, please, that I am photographing the Chip Local on this date only because the Lockport Branch was not served on this date; note, too, that I photographed action on the Lockport Branch thrice in the prior week, and in none of those photo essays did you see any images of the Chip Local; note, furthermore, that I photographed the Lockport Branch because my beloved Napoleonville Branch, the railroad of my earliest days, was gone then and had been for a decade; note, additionally, that I have more recently – starting in the latter part of 2011 – become known for photographing the Chip Local train and Chip himself, a fact that is connected to the other facts mentioned in this long sentence.
Inasmuch as it was even possible, the Chip Local would, for me, basically come to play the role that the branchline trains had played for me, even, in most cases, more than the L&D trains around Raceland did, since those were now almost entirely lease hopper cars and tank cars; the Chip Local usually looked cooler than the post-Valentine-Paper L&D trains of Raceland looked, since the Chip Local looked more like Valentine trains than did the post-Valentine-Paper Raceland L&D trains! Post-Valentine-Paper, the Chip Local was the closest thing that I had to the branchline trains of my youth, but-and I was also coming to appreciate a train of which I had known since the late 1990s when I started driving an automobile; only starting in the latter half of 2011 did I start making any effort to photograph Chip himself!
So, there is a deeper meaning to today’s story of me chasing the Chip Local instead of chasing a train down the Lockport Branch as I would have preferred to do; in just a few short years, I would not ever have a choice anymore, and the Chip Local would be the most interesting game in town, the neatest remaining local train in this area.
One year to the day later, though, I’d be out of the country photographing something very different – while still very familiar – when I visited Kansas City Southern de México’s main yard in Monterrey!
I returned to Whoadieville for a party Uptown on this night.
Saturday, the 31st
I started this day in Whoadieville and ended it on the bayou. In retrospect, this back and forth seems both crazy and totally rational.
At 12:55, I photographed ACFX 82426 at an industry just west of Barataria Boulevard in Marrero.
At 16:04, I shot the Chip Local train coming eastbound into Schriever with HLCX 3802 as power, and you can see Chip’s silhouette in the conductor’s seat.
Like so many of these images, that image would look much better had it saved as a RAW file. What really caught my eye on this train was a beautiful shiny blue boxcar with “PAN AM” written in big letters on the side with a globe logo, the first time that I saw either the “PAN AM” name or the accompanying logo (and I apparently hadn’t even seen any pictures of it yet); the reporting marks were BM. That’s Boston & Maine, meaning that this is a Guilford car.
At 16:55, I shot my last train of the memorable year of 2005, UP train M-NOEW-30 westbound led by FURX 3049 at Schriever.
So ended a very memorable year, and I hope that you appreciated the pictures and stories. Thanks, as always, for your readership.
Jim
