On June 1st of this year the railfan grapevine was alive with news of CSX’s specially painted locomotive northbound on the BNSF out of Houston. I have one of the HO scale models of this locomotive made by Scale Trains, and could not pass up the opportunity to see and photograph it personally. As the day wore on it became evident the manifest train with the unit buried in its locomotive consist would not make it to Fort Worth before dark.
I decided to head south to the siding at Manhattan, Texas between Valley Mills and Crawford, Texas as it offers wide open views on the west side up until sunset on any given day. I arrived there shortly after 4:00 pm and at 4:45 pm I photographed a southbound loaded coal train that had followed me down from Fort Worth.
The two DPU’s were shoving hard as the train was going on to McGregor to meet my northbound target train.
At 5:35 pm the northbound rolled by in perfect sun allowing me to score the following series of CSX #3194.
If it had run several hours earlier I would not have had to drive so far to catch it, but in the end it was worth the effort expended.
