This Space for Rent

Snow Day

The best and I went out this afternoon to pick up a Christmas present at OMSI and to drop a bunch of other presents off at the post office to mail to points east. When we left home, it had just started snowing, but not enough snow had fallen to make the roads treacherous yet. We arrived at OMSI at about 1:45, and of course couldn't help noticing that the 4449 was steamed up and ready to go on the 2pm Holiday Express train.

We went into the OMSI shop and looked around for a while, but soon the lure of actual steam engines in steam pulled me out of OMSI and across the street, where nothing separated me from the Eng!s except a chainlink fence which I could wedge the camera lens up against and get a mainly-clear shot of the 4449 and 100. While I was doing this, the clock must have struck 2pm, because the 4449 gave a toot!, spat out a huge billow of steam, and started moving.

As the 4449 moved backwards, the billows of steam blew over the 100, covering it completely.

While all this was going on, I was hearing the toot! toot! of a diesel somewhere along the line, but I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. But as the clouds of steam began to blow away from the 100, a Union Pacific C44AC appeared behind the 100, running long hood first towards Brooklyn Yard.

I got one more picture of the three engines before the 4449 backed too far away from the 100.

And finally, just before the 4449 had backed far enough away so I couldn't fit the camera (mainly) between the rungs of the chain-link fence, the C44AC moved enough into view to see that it was coupled nose-to-nose to a SD70.

The sad thing about this snow is that it's supposed to turn into freezing rain later this evening, and we've got tickets for the 8pm trip of the Holiday Express. It's not very likely that we'll be able to actually ride the Holiday Express if there is freezing rain and the roads are impassible; the roads were getting slick enough with just the snow, and a coat of freezing rain on top of them will not make matters any better (UPDATE: and, yes, we know now that tickets for the 7pm and 8pm trains will be honored on the 6pm train, but it took us about 40 minutes to get from Powell and Milwaukie to home, and got the information for the latest cancellations from the OMSI webpage for the holiday express at 5:30. 5:30 + 40 minutes == Ooops.)