A Round Trip

Most people don't know much about the railroad except what they see when they have to wait on a train at a crossing so I thought I'd document a round trip and make a post out of it. I didn't feel very well and didn't get very good pictures, but here it is anyway........

The phone rang at 4:45 am for me to be on duty at 6:15.
The train arrived in Temple and we changed crews, then had to wait for the engines to be fueled. Each of them holds about 4500 gallons of diesel fuel. We had three engines for a total of 13,200 horsepower pulling 78 loaded tank cars (weighing in at 10200 tons) of diesel. Total train length was 4897 feet. A relatively short heavy train.
Once we were fueled up and got a track warrant to move west toward Sweetwater we departed Temple at 7:05
We stayed on the move until we got to Castor, a siding about 85 miles from Temple, where we had to stop to meet an east bound train. We were there for about 45 minutes and that's where most of these pictures were taken.


This was our lead unit.

A not so good picture of our train.

This is the train we met at Castor, BNSF 7708

We continued on to Brownwood and then on to Sweetwater without stopping. We arrived at 2:30 in the afternoon. A pretty good trip. 246 miles, 8 1/2 hours on duty. I had been feeling the signs of a cold coming on for a couple of days and it had really hit me by the time we got to Sweetwater. I took some medicine and went to bed, but couldn't sleep very well. Fortunately we were ordered on a deadhead home at 10:00 pm. (Just get in a van and ride back to Temple.) Back home and in bed in the wee hours of the morning.

It's now Saturday morning and I'll probably go to work around 1:00 this afternoon. I was awarded a bid to a Ft Worth job while I was gone on my last trip so that's where I'll be headed today. Still snotty and have a sore head and throat, but I feel better than I did yesterday.

A view through the windshield and the engineer's seat and controlstand.