Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

During our western journey on the California Zephyr, we of course saw other trains. Some of them were once common but are now fading away, including the one I photographed as we passed through Sparks Yard. (We made a brief stop there as well, dropping off railroad crew members who were deadheading from Winnemucca to Sparks.)

( Patching Things Up )

I have spotted this artifact of a memory of a thirty-year-old railroad merger operating on Union Pacific local jobs operating through Fernley out of Sparks. How long it will be here, I don't know.

A train coming into Fernley sounding its horn in repeated short bursts is not a good thing; it means there may be something (or worse, someone) on the tracks. Given that I'd just heard people on motorcycles whizzing by along the tracks, I feared the worst and rushed outside. There, slowing, was an eastbound Union Pacific train with a one-of-a-kind locomotive bearing a "heritage" paint scheme.

( How Fast Can I Unlock the Camera Phone? )

Besides these UP locomotives, trains lately have had a veritable rainbow fleet as UP scrambles to hire locomotives to handle surging traffic. In the past few days I've seen locomotives painted for Canadian Pacific, Canadian National, Norfolk Southern, and Southern Pacific, the last being a "patch job" unit with a UP unit number painted over the ex-SP number while the rest of the unit remains in a now-badly-faded version of the fallen flag's "bloody nose" paint scheme with "Southern Pacific" in Rio Grande-style "speed lettering" from the days after the D&RGW merger and before the sale to UP.

Some say that modern mega-mergers and increasing containerization have taken all of the variety out of railroading, but you couldn't tell that from watching from our front porch. Even better, there's nobody who can tell us, "You're not allowed to take photos here!" because it's our own property.

Fortunately, whatever had prompted this train to sound the warning and stop apparently didn't lead to another tragedy, as a few minutes later they started back up and continued east.