The morning of December 15, 2013, was spent in Augusta, Ga., (see MARK- ERS on page 54), then we headed over to the CSX main line at Jesup, Ga., for the evening. The former Atlantic Coast Line main splits at Jesup, with one line going to Waycross, Ga., and the other going to Jacksonville, Fla. Norfolk Southern crosses CSX on an overhead bridge just north of downtown; this is a former Southern Railway branch line to Brunswick from Macon.
We had ATCS Monitor (which allows you to see a track display similar to what a dispatcher sees on his board) running on a laptop, and as darkness fell we could see on the display that there would be a northbound and southbound train converging on Jesup shortly after sunset. The southbound was closer, so we set up our Alien Bees strobes for a night shot of that, but it was held north of town for the north- bound. Once the southbound train was stopped (we could see it less than a half mile away) it wasn’t long before the northbound came out of the orange glow of the last bit of light in the sky. We did a “going away” view of the northbound, then got the southbound passing the Jesup railfan platform ad- jacent to the Amtrak station. We knew a northbound Amtrak train was in the picture, running about an hour
late, so we relocated to the
“Welcome to Jesup” arch just north of the station. Shortly after the freights cleared, Amtrak made its station stop. ATCS Monitor also indicated a freight was
running north as well;
out of the way, we stuck around for the same composition with the arch. The northbound could be heard blow- ing its horn for the crossing just south of the station. We manned our cameras, and as the locomotive came into the scene we clicked the shutter. We were a bit surprised to get an Amtrak train in the photo —our "freight" turned out to be the northbound Amtrak Auto Train! With nothing else showing on the com- puter display, we tore down our equip- ment and headed into Florida.
once Amtrak had finished loading and was
60 FEBRUARY 2014 •
RAILFAN.COM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66