Potpourii

A week ago tomorrow a trip to Bagley and Fosston was on the agenda. With a meeting in Bagley scheduled for the evening, I didn't leave Wadena until approaching noon. As it turned out this allowed me to catch the local as he worked in town. The trip north was delayed just a few minutes as I captured a few images of the train, led by a pair of blue GP's and with a caboose of all things bringing up the rear. With so little time to spare these are the best I can offer of that outing:


The interplay of the Wadena local and the "Local Cars" sign caught my eye and I had to try and work the sign into a shot.


In the image above, the power is picking up a boxcar spotted at the loading dock in Wadena. The only thing I've ever seen loaded here are beans in giant bags, so I assume that's the lading here as well, but that could very well be mistaken. These boxcars have been more frequent as of late, with MDW, CSX, and BNSF reporting marks all making an appearance.

After shooting the local it was off to the Grand Forks Sub, where I figured on little if any traffic as MN Chris was reporting the presence of a welding crew along the line. A text from Jer reported that westbound was headed up the CP's DL Sub, but I didn't expect to get that far west. Things changed when I finished up in Fosston around 3:45. With no need to get to Bagley until 6:00, I was westbound with Erskine as a goal. Chris was out and about by this time, reporting a BNSF eastbound in addition to the CP train. Erskine seemed the place to be, and I waited for one of the trains to arrive. Chris planned to run over to meet me, but the CP train beat him there and I called him to report the fast moving freight. His detour north left me with only the BNSF train to wait for, so I set up on the Highway 59 bridge for a backlit shot. A short wait yielded this black and white effort:


Since I needed to get to Bagley, I chased the train back east and got a broadside of him near Fosston, shown here.


That was it for train photos, but I was still to be entertained by the tale of Chris's misadventures chasing down the CP westbound. He had travelled the "world's worst road, fit only for giant tired-fertilizer equipment", criss-crossed northwest Minnesota, and encountered a 200 man CP track gang just north of Thief River Falls. The story loses most of its effect in the retelling, but suffice it to say the call I made on the way home was long on entertainment value.

That's the story of my potpurii of a railfanning day. The sun was high and time was limited, but I still managed to shoot a couple of trains.