kevin_standlee | The Good Kind of Black Widow

This afternoon, not long after the eastbound Amtrak went through, I heard them calling signals to meet another train at Darwin (the next siding east of Fernley). Not long after that, I heard the BNSF local (sitting in the "house track" waiting for traffic to clear so that they could go home to Sparks) call out "hot main Fernley" and I went out to take a look. I spotted that the lead unit on the westbound stack train was out of the ordinary and managed to whip out my camera phone and activate it in time to take a picture of a singular locomotive.

That's Union Pacific locomotive 1996 leading the train. It's one of the railroad's "heritage fleet" of locomotives painted in schemes evoking predecessor roads that have since merged into UP. Each unit is numbered for the year it became a part of UP or a predecessor later merged into the larger road. UP 1996 wears a Southern Pacific scheme based on the "Black Widow" and "Daylight" paint schemes. No SP locomotive actually wore this exact livery.

I'm amazed that I managed to get this shot off at all, and pleased to see the SP heritage unit running on "home rails."

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

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From:

delosharriman

Here are my pictures of the same unit, in Fort Worth for National Train Day a couple of years back :
http://pcornelius.livejournal.com/2822.html

dd-b.livejournal.com

Quite apart from drawing the camera and getting it active, you just didn't have much time that the locomotive of interest was visible here! I'm guessing you could see it also somewhere to the left, which cued you to start the process of taking the picture, so you could be ready to exploit this little gap in the line-of-sight obstructions?

kevin-standlee.livejournal.com

To the right (east), but you're right. I heard a train coming and went out onto the porch. I saw the approaching train had something unusual, whipped the camera out of the holster, managed to get it into photo mode, and had perhaps two seconds at most to get it steady and anticipate the train coming out from behind the line of cars parked on the "house track." I got rather lucky.

Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

The Good Kind of Black Widow

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June 2025

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