Blue and Yellow

Last week entailed a trip to Austin, which means a chance to parallel the ICE from Owatonna to my destination and with luck, catch some blue and yellow power leading a train. It's happened in the past, although admittedly not regularly, but often enough to keep hope alive.

The trip down Wednesday afternoon and evening will keep the hope alive for a few more trips, as this train was posed for me as I neared Blooming Prairie:


As I said in the flickr post that night, it seemed like passing on this opportunity would have been plain rude. Besides, any chance to show MN Chris what a blue and yellow unit looks like needs to be capitalized upon. You don't have to drive all the way to Iowa to not see these engines. Heck, I was inspired enough to dig into my bag for the short lens to grab yet another shot.


The only problem with Wednesday evening was the cloud cover, and that was gone on Thursday. After work, it seemed like the perfect time to try my luck yet again, so it was off to the tracks and a hoped-for appointment with more of the classic EMD power. However, it was not to be. The railfanning wasn't an entire loss, though, as the sun gave me a chance to get my first well-lit shot of the former Milwaukee Road depot in Austin. At least I think that's the railroad this served:


What an attractive, and modelable, depot that is. It's almost enough to inspire one to take up passenger modeling, so a train could stop on it's regular schedule to drop and pick up HO scale passengers. Maybe someday?

I Saw a Train

Actually, Mrs. L4T was along, so technically, we saw a train. The particulars: Saturday, in Aldrich, MN, which is not so unusual, it was a westbound coal empty (yawn), GE on the front (ho-hum), and the sun was shining.

What?

Yes, the sun was shining. So I took a photo, which I share with you here.


Obviously late in the afternoon, and that time of year has arrived when shooting on much of Staples Sub is tough due to the sun being so far south. The section of track from Staples to Aldrich is one of the areas where you can get a little afternoon nose light. We were on our way to Staples when I heard this guy clear up his warrant on the Brainerd Sub so crossed my fingers and made for Aldrich. I beat him by about a minute and jumped out for this shot. It would have been nice to get a little further east and avoid the tree shadows, but at this point I'm just thankful that the sun shone enough to create shadows.

The we headed on to Staples, for supper and to see what was in the yard, which was about nothing on Saturday evening. I did take a couple of shots of the depot sporting a new roof. Here are some compare/contrast shots. Before:


After:


And again, before:


And after:


I know I've questioned the likelihood this building could survive before but with the work that has been done, its chances look to be improving. Poor pigeons are going to have to find a new place to call roost, though.

And that was it. Supper was at the Spot, and very tasty. A couple more trains were spotted after dark, which comes all too early time of year. Soon enough we were snug in our house and dreaming of solid consists of SD40-2's rolling freight trains to and fro.

Jim