This Space for Rent

Late again? Tch tch

When I came home from work tonight, I didn't have any expectations of seeing anything interesting at Brooklyn Yard; Amtrak #14 was late, but it was supposed to be really late, and it was cold, I was in my shirtsleeves, and the whole idea of standing on the Toonerville bridge for half an hour just didn't appeal to me. And after I got off the #17 bus and walked over to the yard, only to see absolutely nothing except a couple of covered hoppers, I really didn't expect to see anything interesting.

I waited around for a couple of minutes, then started heading home, but just then a pair of Yellow Menace switchers pulled into view. Oh, well, an Eng! in the hand is worth two in the bush, so I turned around and took a couple of pictures.

Toot, toot!

Hello? That sounded like an ...

Surprise!  It's a passenger train!

... Amtrak train, silently scooting north at track speed.

Amtrak Twinkie #115 swooshes under the Toonerville Bridge

After that train vanished out of sight (but not out of sound; there are a lot of crossings north of Brooklyn Yard and I could hear the twinkies blowing for each one of them until I reached my bus stop) the two Yellow Menace switchers pulled up to the yard throat, giving me a good chance to photograph them before they shoved their cut of cars back into the bowels of the yard.

UP 1117 and 1305, switching

It would have been better if an Alco had gone by, but it was still a good layover between busses.

Note: The slight grain that you may see in these pictures is a relic of (a) using a higher ISO to compensate for the clouds and (b) saving the images as jpegs instead of the better-to-manipulate but slow to process in Irfanview Pentax raw format.