I drove to Irving on the afternoon of Saturday July 31st to visit an old friend. He does not live far from the TRE’s West Irving station, so when I left I drove to the grade crossing just east of there. The gates started down for an eastbound train a minute after I arrived and I took just a going away photo at 4:28 pm since the approaching photo was too heavily back-lit.
Now things got interesting as I heard the TRE dispatcher talk to a westbound BNSF train about getting on the TRE at Dallas to run to Fort Worth following the next westbound passenger train. This was worth waiting for as while freights do run regularly in windows over the TRE, it can be hard to be at the right place at the right time as I was then. At 4:52 pm a westbound passenger run came across the Irving viaduct with streamlined F59PHI 570 leading.
I read a magazine I had in the vehicle, and at 5:17 pm I saw the BNSF train’s headlight appear above the far edge of the viaduct. I was fortunate to have taken both my camera bodies as a cloud shadow was now covering the entire foreground where I was standing. I used the 600 mm equivalent long telephoto to reach out and catch this scene in full sun of the freight exiting the bridge.
A few seconds later I used the other camera with the short zoom to get this closeup with a little post processing help in Lightroom to work with the cloud shadow.
I had been hoping the timing would work out such that I could get both the BNSF freight and the next eastbound TRE train in the same frame, but the two ended up meeting about a mile west of me on double track. At 5:25 pm I used both cameras to record these three views of the eastbound train pulling away from the West Irving station.
With the action done for the time being I headed on home satisfied with my telephoto shot of the BNSF freight exiting the viaduct in full sun as my “photo of the day”.
