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Give me some trains... Please! Saint Cloud. May 13th.
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| I am not a happy
Trainspotter. A change of hours at work means that my usual Friday
mornings sojourns lineside in the Elk River area have been curtailed
and when I do get out there, because of the recession and the cutback
in traffic there is nothing to see. My trip to Northtown really bought
that home. Still, determined to see something I pootled over to Saint
Cloud on the Saturday morning to see if anything would materialise. As
I pulled into the Station car park I could see that there were boxcars
a plenty lined up for scrapping at the scrap merchants yard opposite.
The image below interested me so I thought I'd share it with you. |
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| I didn't have to wait
long to hear the sound of a distant horn indication a train appriaching
from the North. It was a pair of SD's leading a long coal train, with
surprise of surprises another SD on DPU duty at the rear. |
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| After that it went
quite for a bit and then I heard a Northbound being given a warrant to
head up to Gregory from Big Lake so I knew something should be along in
about 20 minutes. When it arrived it was a mixed bag of 44's
ES44 #7406 leading out a C44 and two more ES44's on a
trailer and container stack train. |
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| It passed through and
I was thinking that it might not be such a bad day after all. But you
know my luck. Silence... Not a thing. I began to get quite depressed. So I decided to slide over to the yard to see if anything interesting was parked up there. But as I approached the yard I heard the dispatcher give clearance to a train to head into the yard from the North. Immediately I perked up. That meant I'd get a chance to get a shot of a train crossing the bridge over the Mississippi. I turned and headed back to the bridge. The detector up in Sartell announced 36 axles. Thirty Six? That's a short train. It couldn't be the Sartell local could it? I didn't think that would run on a Saturday. I suppose though if it serves the paper mill it could well run six days a week. Of course in the time between me snapping the last train and waiting for this one. It had clouded over and was even spitting with rain. But I didn't care too much I was looking forward to seeing a train rumble over the bridge and having a camera to record the moment. |
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| There you go. Not the
greatest picture in the world I'll grant you. But it's something I've
wanted to record for quite a while. Maybe next time I'll be able to
shoot it in the sun. Not a great mornings work but the local on the
bridge more than made up for it. |