Ordinary days? I don’t think so!
Jim Tiroch
As most of here reading this article know, we are railfans. As railfans, we tend to carry our cameras where ever we go. I learned that this practice can pay off in a BIG way. I learned this a few days before I decided to write this little piece.
Anything can go wrong on the railroad while your trackside and I have witnessed this numerous times. Here in St. Louis, the ruling grade is a 1.0% grade on the Union Pacific’s Jefferson City Subdivision, formerly the MoPac’s Sedalia Sub. At least once a day, a loaded coal train will stall on the hill snaring traffic flows, and making the dispatchers job a bad job to have. Sometimes, the event can be much more serious than a coal train stalling, or in railroad lingo, “Falling down the Hill”. I learned that out in a big way, which brings me back to the part about having a camera on hand all the time.
Kelly Dunlap, my great friend, and almost like a brother to me, was wanting me to drop him off at the Kirkwood Amtrak Station since I had to get home and pickup my now Ex-girlfriend. She left me because of the following event. As we were turning into the parking lot, he noticed that the signal for track two was lit up for a highball. Before long, we witnessed UP train I-DULA-11 (Dupo – Las Angeles Intermodal) come by, and a few minutes later, we herd UP 6741 get the Highball over our scanners. I thought about shooting from the nearby road bridge, but an instinct was telling me to shoot by the grade crossing. Not one to disobey my instinct, I shot from the road. As I noticed that the approaching train was a coal train, I moaned in protest to the sight of yet another monotones coal train. THIS is were the story gets exciting.
As UP 6741 passed, the engineer, a fellow named Scott, I noticed something was not right with the sound that the GE AC4400CW was making. As I was following the 2nd units cab, I noticed some thick smoke coming from the 6471. As I turned my head to get