The Overland Tales
Chapter 3: A Golden Friday
The faithful and the curious are gathering at the Golden Spike National Historical Park in Promontory Summit, Utah this morning to watch replicas of 1860’s steam locomotives reenact the moment the Golden Spike was driven and iron rails bound the nation. Many friends will be there. I will not, having turned down a ticket in exchange for a day with a guy I don’t get to spend much quality time with: me.
And that guy wants to chase some trains.
Once a simple pleasure, the art of chasing trains by car intent on finding optimal places to photograph them, has become a technological shitshow. It’s quite common to see my peers set out for the day with a scanner radio in the car, another on the hip, and external antennas stuck to the roof (all to track railroad employee communications about train movements); two full digital SLR cameras with batteries, lenses, and SD cards; a video device of some type with its own accoutrements; tripods for each camera; GPS unit; mobile phone, wi-fi hub; maps; and a tangle of power chargers to keep it all humming. Oh, right. And a drone. Gotta have a drone in 2019.
It all makes me want to grab my cameras and leave the rest to fate. That’s what today is all about: fate. I’ve got a rented Ford Expedition with walk-away insurance coverage, a few bottles of water, and no idea where the hell I am going.
Bring. It. On.
Railroads exit Salt Lake City at points all around the compass dial, quite an engineering feat given the wall of mountains that hems in the city to the east and the 1,700 square mile lake lapping against the city’s west side. A mental roll of the dice finds me driving west parallel to the former Western Pacific “Feather River Route” from Salt Lake City to Oakland, California. I’m just looking for a train. Any train will do. I’ll settle for a full mile of municipal waste cars as long as the lighting is good. And it is good. So much so, that I decide to drive as far west as needed to find a train to chase back east. Mind you, I have no idea if such a train is running today.
Interstate 80 more or less follows the old WP across the Great Salt Lake and into the high desert. And I do mean “across” the lake. Mile after mile of the roadway and the railway are built upon man-made causeways. The lake is high this morning and I find it more than a little unsettling to be driving with nothing but water along both shoulders of the road and a good 50 feet of lake between me and the eastbound lanes.
Train chasing requires patience and a bit of gut instinct. An hour into my pursuit near the exit for Aragonite, I get the urge to explore local roads that follow the tracks just a little bit closer than the Interstate. I feel like something is coming. Intuition? Luck? Fate? Whatever you ascribe it to, in a few miles I see that a lineside signal is lit red. On this single-track railroad that should mean just one thing: a train is approaching from the opposite direction. And it is.
I’m not the first to detour into Aragonite. A group of settlers once followed a California Trail short cut through here. Their leader, George Donner, was trying to beat the coming winter weather. I just want to beat the train to a decent photo spot. I’m hoping for better luck than Mr. Donner and company had.
I nose the Expedition onto the dirt shoulder and leap out - camera in hand - amidst my own cloud of dust to capture a BNSF freight train speeding east. Shutter, click. Shutter, click. Wave to the crew. The chase is on.
Read the entire ebook version with many additional photographs
Copyright © 2024 Rob Davis: Digital Innovation Leadership &... - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy Website Builder