Oddball Equipment

[kevin_standlee]

We have somewhere between ten and twenty trains per day passing Fernley. Some of them are oddballs. I knew there was a maintenance-of-way train in the area because I'd heard the dispatcher talking to and about it, but I didn't see it until this morning. I was going out to take a short walk around the block when I saw it coming through. Unfortunately, it took longer than I would have liked to activate my camera, so I only got a going-away picture.



This is just the tail end of the train heading west toward Sparks, where I assume they planned to tie up so the crew can have the holiday.

This train was sounding its horn freely as it rolled by because there was a track maintainer in a high-rail truck on the siding. After the MOW train passed, the maintainer headed west on his business. Maintainers don't actually get holidays, it seems. They're always on call because railroading is a round-the-clock job, and broken rails or malfunctioning signals don't care if it's Thanksgiving or not.

Comments

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

I've been doing a lot of train travel recently (ICE in Germany and Belgium and the Berlin U- and S-bahn) and it made me wonder if you've ever thought about visiting Europe just to ride the trains, or adding a train holiday onto a con.  You could clock up a lot of fantastic trains on a Eurailpass.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes I have, but even with the years of seniority I have, there's only so much time off I have accumulated. The Eurocon trip was done in such a way as to give me some new train rides, and I added some rail tourism onto the end of the Loncon trip, and I also took the overnight sleeper from Glasgow to London after the second Glasgow Worldcon. I typically try to add some rail tourism to my trips when possible (see my road trip to Kansas City this year), but my calendar tends to be written around Worldcon and to a lesser extent Westercon.