Railfanning - May 23, 2015

Hi, Saturday, May 25 was Day In North America for Railroads Illustrated Annual. I was joined by friends Jeremy and Jim Beck, and Rudy Volin for a trip to the former Pennsylvania Railroad Middle Division, now the NS Pittsburgh Line.

We arrived at CP Banks, the former site of Banks tower, just in time to catch #38J pass #16N.

Our second lucky catch was at Cove where the Savannah & Atlanta heritage unit lead #20W east.

After waiting awhile at Cove we moved further west to a location about a mile east of Newport, PA.  First up was this eastbound manifest.  What appears to be a Gazebo at the left is actually a shelter for a manually operated water pump.

We could hear a west bound approaching when suddenly it seemed like an eastbound also was getting close.  Before I could fully get into position the eastbound Pennsylvanian rounded the curve just to the west.

Almost immediately after the Pennsylvanian disappeared an intermodal came west

followed shortly by a second intermodal , #21J.

On the west side of Newport is CP Port where we caught #23Z.

Continuing west we stopped at Thompsontown where we shot another westbound intermodal,

eastbound coal train #400, and

#13G.

There is a nice open space at Mexico with New York Central style block signals.  Here we shot #11J and

# 56V splitting the signals.

Then Jeremy and I moved out from the track to shoot #17G,

the westbound Pennsylvanian, and

#21M in quick succession.

At Port Royal there were a number of eastbound trains for which the light was not really good.  Therefore, I tried for some new angles that would make the best use of the side light (above and two below).

Also, I took a couple of more conventional photographs of these two eastbound trains (above and two below).

Here a young railfan waves to the crew of an eastbound tank train.

Our final train at Port Royal was this westbound auto rack train.

We then drove directly to the west end of the Rockville Bridge in Marysville in hopes of getting a westbound in sweet light.  However, it was not to be.  This eastbound intermodal train crawled across the bridge.  While it was doing so the only westbound during the 40 minutes or so we were there passed behind it.

Thanks for looking.