Visibility less than 100 yards…no matter what, you were shoving “blind” in the literal sense.
Stayed this way till 10:30 am…
BNSF just tied them down and waited.
Just wondering where did you take these photos?? I am guessing based upon your profile that the location is somewhere near Houston TX. I got interested in this topic because the interior San Francisco Bay Area had a rare foggy morning this past Sunday (Nov 18, 2007). The San Joaquin Valley is notorious for very thick tule fog in the winter season. Usually the interior Bay Area stays clear of the thick foggy weather. That is the reason for my current interest in this subject.
Thank you very much for sharing your photos with us! I really enjoy your photos!
— Daniel
We’ve had days (and nights!) like that. There’s not much we can do on our hump when it gets that way, either. I can remember one night back in the days when we “had to keep humping” that I’d ask them to mark the end of a car leaving the hill by putting a lighted fusee on it–then I’d watch it go down to the point where it went in the clear (so I thought, based on experience) before throwing the switch. We’d also listen for coupling impacts, and sometimes take a walk to see if everything was still in the clear on our end.
Nowadays half of the people who’d want us to keep humping don’t even know what fusees are!
That is pretty close to the “TULLIE” fog in the San Juaquin Valley of California. Even though I “knew” where I was going I got lost in that fog one night and wound up at the end of an off ranp on Rout 99 instead of staying on the interstate. Bouy was I embarassed.
Heh, it looks like that around here tonight!
Dan,
That’s where I work, the PTRA, Port Terminal Railroad Association’s North Yard, in Houston Texas.
This is the north end of the yard, within rock throwing distance of the turning basin for the Houston Ship Channel.
All three photos are shot in our diesel shops fuel tracks and the locomotive tie up track.
Houston is about 45 miles off the Gulf of Mexico.
Really silly dispatcher had a BN yard to yard transfer job shove back out of the north end of the yard in this fog…about a mile and a half shove…she wanted to run them through UP’s Basin yard and out to BNSF’s Old South Yard…she could have sent them out th south end and over to BNs New South Yard…but than would mean holding a rock train in a siding for 30 minutes…instead she tied up a main line for over an hour, as the poor conductor had to walk ahead of his shove, because he couldn’t see far enough to ride the car…walk 20, 30 yards, have the engineer shove…stop and walk another 20 30 yards…
Fog like this happens in cycles here…it will do this for about two or three days, then a front will blow through…
Be thankful they know what “humping” means (in the railroad context).