Sometimes, the things we don't anticipate or know about work out to be some of the best, and the latest outing of the NS OCS and F units go to prove that point. When the train departed Altoona PA last week, all that was known was that it was headed "West" Rumors had it going to Chicago or other points. As they progressed across Ohio on Friday, the "network" of folks out watching started to make the trip a little more interesting, at least for me. The train arrived went to Bellevue Ohio, well past the normal routing it takes to come down this way towards KY, with most of us figuring it WAS headed for Chicago. Then...it turned South towards Columbus and Cincinnati.
By mid-evening on Friday it was pretty much a given it was headed this way,and soon the destination of Birmingham Al. was confirmed, and it sure looked like it would be a mostly daylight trip down the CNO&TP. I had been up since 0600 Friday morning, worked all day, but stayed up pretty much all of that night talking to folks up North tracking the train. After figuring the train would be in Cinncy around 0230, I layed down and took a nap, all the time calculating running times in my head to guess at when we needed to get up. I managed a couple of hours of restless sleep, and after reading the train was out of Cinncy at 0330, Carmon and myself packed up and headed out to Danville at 0530. With a roughly 3 hour running time from Cinncy to Danville, I figured they would be well South of Somerset before the light was any good. As luck would have it, a huge amount of trains where running that morning, and the deadhead OCS was following several Southbounds, and getting some Major delays.
By the time they departed Danville KY, it was after 0930, the sun was out and it looked like it was going to be a good day. Due mostly to the fact the OCS followed a pair of slow moving Southbounds, we where able to leapfrog and get some good stuff in a lot of places I had always wanted to shoot the F units. The icing on the cake was getting to shoot some other good stuff, like 143 with a former SD40-2 leading. By the time the sunshine was gone, we had wound up near Cloverdale Ga, just a few miles North of Alabama, and had driven over 600 miles through 3 states without stopping for food or much of anything else. By the time we got back home Sunday morning, we had been going for over 20 hours...and It was well worth the effort. Truth be told, I was ready to give it up around Oakdale TN, but a certain redhead kept spurring us on....
Enough of the novel.. Carmon has already posted her pics on Sunday, and I have all of mine done now and up on Pbase. Check the link below to get to the gallery...
http://www.pbase.com/kd4jsl/2010ocs
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(https://www.jreb.org/ns/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fjreb.org%2Fv-web%2Fgallery%2Falbums%2Falbum49%2Fns956springcitytn_1_080710.sized.jpg&hash=fc6f594c5365739fd69810193def19887d712692)
You did good there Emmett! When I got up at 6 AM Saturday morning and checked your site and saw that it was somewhere south of Cincinnati I just said that there was no way that I could have made it over that
way in time so I crawled back into bed. Wrong decision. Joe Vittitoe
IF they would have made the usual time between Cinncy and Danville, then your trip back to bed would have been a good idea. I figured as late as we had left the house, we would just make it there ourselves, but wound up waiting almost 4 hours for the fun to begin. 4 hours more of sleep I could I have had :)
Like most other things dealing with the RR's, you just really never know whats gonna happen, and the best way to stay on top of it is to be there..