Late as usual, I see
My corporate masters let everyone out of work early this afternoon, and rather than going directly home, I decided that I'd take the #9 bus out to 21st St, then walk back down to 11th and take the #70 home. I didn't check the Amtrak schedules, but the northbound Coast Starlight is pretty reliably a couple of hours late coming into Portland, so I was hoping that I could have a couple of Twinkies before dinner.
You can't walk directly along the railroad from 21st down to 11th, but you can dodge back and forth across it by using the overpass at 15th St and the informal crossing at 14th. The afternoon fireworks started just as I crossed over to at 14th, when a southbound Yellow Menace freight started tootling for the crossings down by the river, then came scooting by as if it wasn't going to stop until it reached Eugene.
After #3806 shot by, all the signals went dark except for one yellow blinking northbound signal. It was 5pm by now, and the UP tries to clump trains so they don't block the mainline for too long during the rush hour, so I figured that something would be coming from the south pretty quickly. It probably wouldn't be a freight train, because if one was waiting it would have been stopped at 15th Ave waiting for clear signals north. And if it's not a freight, there aren't too many other choices for what it could be.
Sure enough, it wasn't very long before the crossing gates came down and a pair of twinkies shot by with the late-as-usual Coast Starlight, just before a bank of clouds covered the sun for the usual weekend ritual of gloom and cloudiness.
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A worthy wait for a train.
The Coast Starlight is a train worth riding late or not. I’m gonna take a stroll down to LA late this year. Looking forward to it! :)