10th September 2019 · Noth American Wanderings

Presenter: John Day

For our first meeting of the new season, we welcomed back John Day from Ipswich with a selection of images from his more recent visits to the United States. John has family in La Grange in Kentucky and that was the starting point.

Most of the images were of freight trains, often over a mile in length with sometimes as many as ten locomotives working it although only the leading loco would have a driver with those within the train and at the rear being radio controlled. Numerous different liveried locomotives featured, BNSF, CSX, Union Pacific & Norfolk Southern to name just four. Often we saw different company’s locomotives working together on the same train.

The scenery was as equally spectacular with trains seen in the Mojave Desert, along the Colorado River and Marias Pass in Montana and the variety of freight ranged from double stacked inter modal trains, coal trains, grain and even aircraft fuselages.Some Amtrak services featured which we learnt were nearly always running hours late.

We saw views of the enormous BNSF Barstow yard and freight trains stacked up around Chicago. One train crew even ordered a pizza while John was photographing as they had a long wait.

Back at La Grange, trains run along the street and it was quite something to see enormous freight trains running alongside the stalls of a carnival that was in progress. John finished with images of a privately owned QJ which he had previously photographed in China and an oil-fired 4-8-4 working and making plenty of smoke.

This was a wonderful show made even more enjoyable by John’s humorous facts and knowledge of the American railway scene.