Day 2

Welcome to Day 2.

Overview

Saturday morning April 12 was bright and sunny as I was preparing to leave the motel at Winnemucca. I was up on the 2nd floor and as I walked down the stairs with bags in hand to the car I could not see the bottom steps in the shadows. Thinking I was about to step down onto the ground my left foot found air instead and I missed the bottom step and turned my foot over when I landed hard on the pavement. I felt pain immediately but managed to get to the car and dropped the bags in the car. I left the motel and started exploring Winnemucca. I found the ex-WP yard and looked it over. I recalled photos of the depot taken from an overpass and driving over the tracks saw the depot was no longer standing. Too bad. It looked like a neat depot from the photos.

I then decided to drive east and check out some of the exits to see if there were some nice photo angles nearby. East of Winnemucca the ex-SP and ex-WP lines are side by side with the SP used by westbounds and the WP used by eastbounds. The signaling was directional. However there was trackwork going on east of here towards Palisades Canyon on the ex-WP line so the ex-SP was being used by both eastbounds and westbounds. I had a long wait before I heard that there was an eastbound Z-train coming. There was a good sun angle back near the Button Point exit (west of Golconda which is MP 439 on the SP) so I waited there for the Z-train which was coming east against the current of traffic on the normally westbound ex-SP line. I also heard that there were three westbounds waiting at Battle Mountain where the first passing track was located. At 11:41am the UP 8382/4476 passed by headed for Battle Mountain. The first photo shows the eastbound Z-train with units 8382/4476 near Button Point on the ex-SP line. The next two are of the Z-train entering the siding at Battle Mountain and getting in the clear so the westbounds can leave. The headlight of the first westbound can be seen in the distance.

 

 

It was at this time I began to feel a lot of pain from my left foot. It was getting hard to walk. I then headed west to Golconda to wait on the westbounds. The first westbound with the 9821/4671 arrived at 1:24pm. I photographed the second westbound with the UP 7703/3889 but the photos did not come out that good. For the third train I drove back to the Button Point exit as I remembered there was a nice westbound shot here. That last train was a winner with units 5176/Y896/4569/4409/3 HLCX SD40-2's 7205/6253/6298.

 

 

By now my I could no longer stand on my left foot. Any pressure on it at all caused incredible pain. I knew I had a problem. I drove back to Winnemucca and found a drug store to get something to treat the pain but could not step out of the car! I figured it was just going to take time to heal. Knowing I could not even get out of the car to photograph anything now I kind of lost interest in trains for the rest of the day which is just as well as it seemed there were no more running! I slowly drove east and checked out some locations along the way. By the time the sun went down I was in Elko, NV where I was going to spend this night. I am sure the desk clerk wondered about me as I hopped into the office on one foot. After getting settled in I got dinner at the Wendys drive through and stayed in my room the rest of the evening. This wasn't really the way I had envisioned spending my first full day in Nevada!