I'm with Ish on the travelling. Can't get enough. So much to see, so little time.
I wish I had the money to do more of it. Sadly my days of storm chasing are over.
Storm chasing trips for most people are all about the storms, but for me it's the whole experience including rail fanning. A storm chase has brought me to Oklahoma City, for example, with trips up and down all the way to Montana and as far south as the Mexican border. While on these trips, I would be on the lookout for trains of course and would see those countless mile-long container trains along the Strafford Sub in Texas, as well as, numerous granger branches which contrast from the busy mainlines with their small Alco S2s, ancient Baldwin diesels, and rusty Geeps as opposed to the big ES44's SD70s, and other GEVOs on the busy mainlines.
The freights on the mainlines such as the Strafford Sub, are stacked up one after another all stacked up behind each other in both directions, With the highway paralleling the tracks, you can see the signals flip from red to green, green to red as these fast moving freights pass the interlockings, which made the line look as busy as any model railroad could be.
Then there's the Powder River Basin with the empty coal trains stacked up in the yard with the mainline east full of moving coal trains. Even with the slowdown in coal business due to the boom in natural gas, the Powder River Basin is still busy. These coal trains move out of there at 50-60 mph, which is unbelievably fast and much faster than any freight we have back here in Pan Am territory where we might see 40 mph on the commuter lines.
This year we were station out of Denver, and headed up to the Black Hills in South Dakota. There were many, many coal trains in and around Orin Jct. in Converse, WY as well as oil trains, container manifests, and general freight. During the second week, we were down in La Junta, Pueblo, and Trinidad CO where the BNSF and UP were pretty busy as well. This didn't count of course the hotel where we stayed in Denver, which is located next to the new A-line to the airport. I went out on a slow morning to watch the new Comet trainsets, similar to those used by SEPTA, On more than one occasion, I also saw some UP freights on the nearby freight line which runs parallel to the A-line on the same ROW.
