On Saturday morning November 13th, a friend alerted me to an eastbound UP merchandise train on the Baird Sub. The interesting thing about this particular train was a dead-in-transit locomotive in the form of a retired EMD SD9043MAC #3564. I quickly drove over to Iona where the lighting would be optimal for an eastbound train at 10:42 am.
An eastbound intermodal was not far behind and I caught it coming through Aledo at 11:05 am.
I went back to the house for a few hours and came back out after 2:00 pm with the primary goal of using the drone to capture a westbound train climbing the grade to Iona Siding out of Fort Worth. Specifically I wanted to capture an aerial view of a train coming through the area where UP this past summer had cut down part of the tree tunnel here to facilitate realigning the curves. At 3:17 pm I accomplished my goal with this westbound intermodal. You can see the distant Fort Worth skyline in the upper left center of the first photo.
The radio alerted me there was an eastbound train at Earls so I drove back to Aledo again to record an intermodal train’s passing there at 3:45 pm.
I now heard a westbound train was coming out of Fort Worth to meet this train at Iona. I lined up a wide-angle photos working in the patio area of Montes Burritos that now occupies the old PoquitoMas Restaurant building facing the track. These shorter days brought long shadows at 4:04 pm when the the intermodal rolled through Aledo.
I was happy with the results for the day and headed home for Saturday night dinner.