Railroad Picture of the day
I didn't think that I'd be doing any trainspotting today. Yellow engines are not in very much favor around Chateau Chaos, and the northbound Coast Starlight was scheduled to arrive in Portland at 18:10, and if I waited that long for a train I'd arrive home to a den of ravening bears. So I decided I'd just take the bus home when I left work today.
Unfortunately, I was a little late out the door and I fell headlong into the now-traditional south-end-of-downtown traffic jam (Arthur Street is also highway 26, and a truly ridiculous amount of traffic comes through it during rush hour. It doesn't help that the road to the Ross Island Bridge turns off Arthur Street, goes up a ramp, narrows to one lane, mixes with an exit from Front Ave, then gets two more lanes of traffic feeding into it at the west foot of the bridge) and the #19 didn't arrive and didn't arrive and didn't arrive. So eventually I gave up on waiting for the #19 and walked one stop closer to the bridge, because that would put me at a #17 stop as well as the #9 and #19. As I suspected a #17 was the next bus to show up, so I hopped on to join the traditional creep across the bridge.)
If I'm riding the #17, I transfer at 17th and Haig because that's at the north end of Brooklyn Yard and there's a chance that something interesting might show up while I'm waiting for the #70. And by the time I reached this stop it was already 17:50, so there was actually a dim chance that something interesting might get there before the clock struck 18:02 and the next #70 came by. After all, 18:10 is quite late for the Coast Starlight and the engineer might have been able to make up a few minutes.
The signal tower to the north was showing green over red, which was a good sign, and I hadn't heard the chortle of twinkie whistles when I was waiting for the bus, so if the train had even recovered 5 minutes there was a chance that I'd see it before I had to bolt for the bus.
I parked myself on the sidewalk next to the derail and waited....
Oh, look, they made up 10 minutes!
It was nice enough to get a picture of the oncoming train (nicely framed by a tree, the Toonerville bridge, and the stainless steel office building that plays merry hob with exposure values when you try to take a picture of a train going by,) but as the train rushed towards me I realized that there was another surprise in the consist; it was not the traditional pair of twinkies, but was a far more interesting lashup:
A Twinkie, a P32, and a F59? Now that's something you don't see every day.
If I'd only known I would have tried to find a place somewhat further away from the tracks and gotten a side view of the three engines, but if I'd done that I would have missed the 18:02 bus. As it stood I got the pictures and then had to cool my heels for another 6 minutes before my connecting bus arrived.