On the morning of Sunday September 13th I was notified that BNSF 5872 was leading a Wellington, Kansas to Pearland, Texas vehicle train passing Oklahoma City. The weather was overcast at the time so I decided to wait to make decision as to if and where to catch it. The clouds started to clear up after lunch and it became evident that if I wanted to catch the train in daylight I would need to be north of Alliance Yard.
I left the house around 3:00 pm and made my way north following the Fort Worth Sub looking for likely spots to photograph the train on the way back south. I met up with Troy Minnick and other railfan friends at Metro when it became evident the vehicle train would be meeting Amtrak 822 there. At 6:13 pm the BNSF 5872 South arrived and started to pull slowly down the siding.
I quickly relocated to the west end of the siding where Amtrak 822 rolled north up the main at 6:18 pm.
I quickly switched to my second camera body with the 100 – 400 zoom for this meet photo.
Now that Amtrak was out of the way, I concentrated on this sequence of the 25th Anniversary unit’s passage.
Since the train was moving slowly back to the main I had time to jump ahead for this view from the shoulder of FM 156 with the Krum water tower.
I made it through Krum without delay, and so with a mile lead on the train I pulled over just north of the north switch at Ponder for this slightly more nose on photo.
A quick twist of the zoom nailed this close up view of the speeding train.
Traffic through Ponder was light enough that the chase group was able to make it to the clearing just north of Justin for this final (for me anyway) photograph of the train at 6:45 pm before the setting sun dropped behind a cloud bank in the west.
On the way home at 7:50 pm I encountered a westbound UP intermodal struggling up the grade out of Fort Worth to Iona, so I pulled over at the location of the old west end of the siding for this “hail mary” shot at ISO 6400.
I assumed the vehicle train would be somewhere around Temple by Monday morning, but I was happily proven wrong.
