Midweek Photos 11/21/2012

Great photos. thanks for posting!!

Nice photos.  I went back home(Oxford,Ne) for deer season this year and here are some photos.  The wood sided box car has been there since I first remembered (early 70s).  The other shots are by a ethanol plant near Minden. 

An unusual consist combination heading Westbound through Berea, Ohio

Well weathered NS locomotive.

John

I have been very busy with work, but finally got caught up and put some real pressure on my boss to give me last Friday off.  It was South Dakota rifle/deer season and I have a dandy place to hunt on a ranch in the far northwestern corner where SD meets ND and MT.  I stayed in Hettinger, ND, a small town on the old MILW mainline.  I've been hunting antelope out there for nearly 20 years now, but this year the antelope had all died in the past two blizzards.  Life on the Northern Plains is harsh.

Since my primary mission was to shoot a deer or two, I spent all of my daylight hours chasing deer.  My tags were for whitetail, but the ranch was populated only with mule deer.  It took me a whole day to figure that out.   At sundown I went back to Hettinger to eat at the Pasttime Bar & Grill, where I got a great prime rib for about ten bucks.  The meat came from the ranch I hunted on, about eight miles away.  After dinner I walked down to the BNSF depot, where I had spotted a grain train sitting in a siding.  I pulled out my Leica IIIc and lenses 3.5cm & 5cm (all 1940s vintage) and began taking some shots.  This is the great thing about trains--unlike deer you can chase them any time of day.  They're always there for you and it's always open season!  A crew van came up and dumped off two guys.  We began to talk.  The engineer was from the nearby* town of Lemmon, SD.  He told me the whitetail deer were thick around the Shadehill Reservoir.  He and friends had killed eight of them there last Saturday afternoon with no trouble.  I thanked him for the tip!  He said that the single track line was all jammed up tonight as the sidings were full and they couldn't get enough crews out to move them.  There should be several trains moving through between 8 PM and 3 AM.  I was tempted as I did have my flash equipment with me, but I had to take a raincheck since I needed to be up by 5 AM to go catch a deer.

The trains ran all through the night, something unusual on that line where volume is usually 2-6 per day.  At 5 AM I woke up, gathered my stuff, and headed out into the darkness.  I found the location at Shadehill the BNSF crew had told me about, and began walking through it.  It was a large savannah; the tall thick prairie grass made walking tough.  I saw no deer.  After several hours I returned to my RAV4.  When I was about 40 yards from my car, I spotted something in the tall grass about 50 feet from my car.  It was a small deer's head, looking around!  I snapped my .30-06 to my shoulder and pulled the trigger.  Dang, that was easy!  I should have just sat in my car eating Ho-Ho's instead of doing all that walking.  I left the deer at a locker a few miles north of Lemmon, SD.  That gives me a great excuse to drive back out there again in a few weeks.  Hopefully the trains will be as thick as the mule deer!

Kent in SD

*Lemmon was 42 miles away;

 very close by SD standards.