Day 3
Welcome to Day 3.
Overview
Sunday morning at Elko, NV was bright and sunny. My foot was still hurting but I was able to limp gingerly on it so I was making progress. In the car I headed east to the yard and found an eastbound general merchandise train was pulling out of Elko on the ex-WP line. The chase was on! Not being familiar with where I was going I relied on exits leading to familiar names to find spots to photograph the train. Halleck was on some maps so I got off the freeway there and drove over to the tracks and saw the train approaching quickly. It was by me at 9:54am and was led by UP 7852/4491/4416 and bringing up the rear was DPU UP 5270. The 7852 was really clean and I am guessing pretty new.
I knew by radio chatter there was an eastbound stack train following the 7852 and Deeth, NV was also on my list of places to check out so I took that exit next and found there was a side road that crossed the tracks on an overpass. I parked off the road and waited until I saw a headlight off to the west. I was pretty happy with the location and my photos of the UP 5226/4208 as the stack train went by at 10:54am. Around 11:30am another headlight appeared and another eastbound stack train approached on the ex-WP. But I was at track level for this one near the grade crossing. This train had the UP 4646/5073 up front.
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I was hoping for a westbound on the ex-SP line and shortly after 12:30pm heard a horn to the east of me. I made my way back onto the bridge and caught a westbound stack train on the ex-SP with units 4627/4597/9307/3877. Like the other two eastbound stack trains I caught earlier at Deeth this one had a lot of 53' Pacer StackTrain containers. This was probably my favorite photo from the trip. I liked the curve and the mountains in the background. It was a pleasant scene.
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Yet while I was Deeth I recalled a tragic incident back in 1981 that occurred here on the paired WP and SP line. Late one night a westbound WP train tripped a nearby hotbox detector while heading west on the SP line so the crew stopped the train, cut the power off and ran lite engines about 2-3 miles ahead to get the detector readout that was located in a specific signal box. After getting the readout info the headend crew went back to the train. Apparently the crew misjudged the distance back to their train in the dark and collided with their own train at a fairly high rate of speed. Two crewman riding in the leading locomotive died in the wreck. I could not help but think about this incident while watching that westbound pass underneath me.
I then got back into the car and headed west back to Elko where the westbound was going to go on duty at 1340. I staked out a location near the tunnels just east of Carlin and waited for the 4627 to show up. While it was a "wrong side" shot I thought it was pretty interesting.
There was one other westbound later that afternoon at 3:39pm I caught at Halleck but my one photo of it wasn't really that exciting. And that was the last train to run in daylight hours. The scenery was really nice but there were not many trains running. I went back to the motel in Elko and spent the rest of the evening watching TV and resting my foot which was still hurting somewhat.
