March 09, 2016 06:57AM
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Registered: 16 years ago
Posts: 14,589
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Hello again -
Forty years ago today, if the calendar on [
www.freedomtrain.org] is correct - and almost exactly to the hour - #4449 waited in West Texas for a freight to cross the diamond ahead of her
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About two hours later the sun had risen high enough on an overcast morning to allow a slightly blurry photo of a moving engine to be taken. The train was headed southeast from Wichita Falls (or Amarillo?) back to Fort Worth, where she would turn north and head for Oklahoma City the following day
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A few miles farther on #4449 had her work cut out for her, pulling a heavy 22-car train up a pretty good grade ('Archer Hill' is stuck in my mind, but I doubt that's the correct name). Running without a helper, IIRC she was down to ten or twelve miles per hour with the booster cut in when I caught this one
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The last frame on my last roll of color film - #4449 triumphantly cresting the hill. Orange-vested fireman Andy Adams had spotted me, and was adding steam from the whistle to the thick cloud of exhaust
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The following morning Dick Jensen and I stood trackside as #4449 blasted upgrade out of Fort Worth. One of the drawbacks of shooting medium format was that not every local drugstore carried 120 film, so I don't have a photo of the scene - which was similar to the one created by #610 at Bellville less than three weeks earlier, but with a city skyline behind. That was the last time I saw the American Freedom Train, and I didn't see #4449 herself for more than a year. She was moved to Birmingham, Alabama sometime after the AFT tied up in Miami, Florida at the end of the year, and then arrangements were made with AmTrak for her to pull a passenger special on her way home from Birmingham to Portland Oregon in April, 1977 - see [
ngdiscussion.net] for photos.
*****
I had originally planned to head home to California from Fort Worth, but Dick invited me to ride along to Trinity, Texas, to check out what was left of an abandoned railroad - the Waco, Beaumont, Trinity and Sabine. Known locally as the Wobblety, Bobblety, Turnover and Stop - or something like that - the line's right-of-way was heavily overgrown with brush. Somewhere along the road I had found a couple more rolls of film; it was too dark inside the boarded-up belt-line shop to get any photos, but I did get a few shots of a very decrepit WBT&S 2-6-2 rusting in the weeds
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The next day Dick headed home to Chicago; he dropped me at a bus station somewhere along the way - probably Dallas - and I headed home via Denver and Telluride, where in each case I stayed with friends for a few more days of railfanning and sightseeing.
Thank You for allowing me to share my standard-gauge adventure here on the narrow-gauge forum!
Th', Th', That's All, Folks!!
-
Roosso
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/27/2016 11:36AM by Russo Loco.
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Russo Loco |
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