Another Wednesday has arrived! Time again for Midweek Photos. Where has the call of the air horn or steam whistle led you this week?
This past week, I was on the road and wound up in Phillipsburg, NJ. It was a dreary day, but I did catch a train.
Yes. Even garbage trains need love, too. They are as necessary as steel, stone, grain and petroleum in keeping our economy on the move 
How classy was your experience in catching trains on the move or even standing still over the past week or so? Feel free to post any of your images here. Have a great weekend.
The shorter daylight is causing my favorite railroad, the Dakota & Iowa, to end up running at night more. And, it's at 8 PM instead of 2 AM. Last week I heard a heavy D&I trian go up the hill near my house, and I went after it. I got ahead of it and set up a few flash in the S-curves by Akron, IA. I waited, alone in the dark. The area used to be heavily wooded, but many trees went down in the epic ice storm we had earlier this year, burying the tracks. They bulldozed much of it out. It's still an interesting spot to catch a train, so I did. The engines are SD-39s, something EMD made less than 50 of.
Here, I found a Lexion combine unloading beans into a grain cart pulled by a large New Holland tractor. The grain was then shuttled to a nearby semi-trailer for the trip to the elevator. There's over half a million dollars worth of machinery in the first photo. This field was a square mile in size. The farmer said he was making 50 bushels, so there'll be about 30,000 bushells hauled out of there. Most of it will end up going on the train at some point. This is just one field, owned by one farm. Most trains out here are hauling grain.
