I spent about ninety minutes freezing my butt off at Eola today but while there I saw what I consider two oddities and would appreciate comments from the peanut gallery.
First, westbound Amtrak 5 came through with the usual two Genesis units BUT it had TWO identical nine car consists! Both had a baggage car followed by eight identical cars! What gives?
Secondly, is BNSF so hard up for power that they run a hot intermodal train (came through eastbound at about 2:15 p.m.) powered by an old SD40-2 and a GP40-2M…and it was a VERY long intermodal and he was just crawling with both units pulling for all they were worth…also very interesting indeed.
amtrak need an extra train somewhere? as far as the bnsf power we had 2 mookies(sd 70 macs greenies) taking a powder river coal train east.someone at deshler told me they would put sd40-2s on an intermodal because they pick up speed faster if they are going through slow order areas.
Jim, I wouldn’t have access to details, but, given the rough weather folks have had to the west of us, I suspect that the second consist is one that was annulled at some point, and is being deadheaded to Chicago. This is just a wild guess.
Weather may have had something to do with the lack of high-class power as well.
(I know our perishable train was struggling to get through eastern Nebraska today.)
Wow! That is worth freezing your butt of for in my opinion. A double Amtrak train? I can remember seeing, almost two times right in a row, Amtrak #6 that had its usual consist, but with two Horizon cars dead-heading in front of the baggage car. That was an interesting change!
Although I’m not positive about the first, I assume its a deadhead equipment move west. The second item was probably a Q train. Sometimes they will run Q trains(i.e. QDENCHI, QSSECHC) inbound to Willow Springs, Corwith or Cicero that are loads but the trailers are actually empty. The train looks like a Z train but is actually very low priority in comparison(been stuck on a couple myself). It was probably in the neighborhood of 3000 tons and most of the time these trains get very little power. I had one once that had a single sd-40 from Galesburg to Willow Springs where the fastest we could get was 30(except going down edelstein) and most of the time made around 20 mph. Pure torture. That is probably what you saw.