A couple of shots on a hot Kansas afternoon. I grabbed these quickly while driving home from the Santa Fe Convention in Wichita last month. Usually, the busy days are Tuesday through Saturday, and traffic was predictably sparse this Sunday. This is what BNSF looks like in central southern Kansas.
These two are taken just a couple of miles west of Wellington, 300 miles from home. For a long time, I had wanted to get a really compressed shot of a train coming through the distant sag and up over the hump at this location, but, when I arrived there, this train was already approaching at high speed, so I had almost no time to get ready and just used the short telephoto that was already on the camera. The going-away shot shows Wellington, Kansas, where the train will stop and exchange its Amarillo crew for a Kansas City crew. Next trip I vow that I'll take a whole weekday en route to shoot trains between Attica and Wellington. During the week, there will be enough traffic that I can carefully set up a shot and a train will come to me before long.
These two were taken out on the prairie between Kiowa and Attica, Kansas. Just out of sight behind the camera there is a controlled signal for eastward trains. and there's a convenient gravel area where I stopped to take a look at the signal. It was green over red, which means that a train is lined up. Sure enough, I heard a whistle and a headlight peeked over the hump. The train approached and passed at a very moderate speed, because it was not a top priority train and it was the weekend. BNSF operates all but the hottest trains at reduced speed on the weekend, as there is no point in rushing this train to Kansas City or Chicago and unloading it on the weekend, when the customers will not come to pick up the containers until Monday. By reducing the speed, the railroad avoids unnecessary container storage at its facilities and - more importantly - saves quite a bit of money on fuel.
