Everything was in place to get a killer photograph of an eastbound train on the New Castle District of Norfolk Southern in Seven Mile, a small town in Southwest Ohio north of Hamilton.
Train 25A was waiting on the main for a meet with westbound manifest freight 174, which would go into the siding.
We had set up along a rural road to get a view over a cornfield of the 25A passing a grain elevator on the south side of town. We had earlier gotten a side view of the 174 on the north edge of New Miami.
The rear of the 174 rumbled past and we waited in anticipation of seeing the ditch lights of the lead unit of the 25A come on to indicate it was on the move. A bonus was the three Union Pacific locomotives lashed together elephant style that were pulling the 25A.
This is an intermodal train that originates at Calumet Yard in Chicago and carries a block of containers that NS gets from the UP. It also carries blocks of manifest freight.
We waited, and waited and waited. It would be 45 minutes before the dispatcher directed the 25A to continue east. We don’t know why the train didn’t leave sooner.
But as we waited what had been a few decorative clouds grew into additional and larger clouds.
You’ve probably figured out where this story is headed. By the time the head end of the 25A reached the grain elevator the sun had ducked behind one of those clouds.
We got cloud skunked.
I made some photographs anyway, one of which is the top image above.
We chased the 25A to Hamilton and managed to get an image of it coming around a curve in good sunlight. It was nice but not the image we had wanted to get.
After getting lunch at Subway, we returned to our location along that rural road at Seven Mile and waited for another eastbound.
Nothing was moving so we headed north. Along the way we got wind that the 189, a Detroit (Oakwood Yard) to Atlanta (East Point) manifest freight was coming.
The 189 would go into the siding at Seven Mile to meet the westbound 282, a stack train running from Jacksonville, Florida, to Chicago (Landers Yard).
The 189 had a BNSF leader and a Ferromex unit as a rear DPU. The nose of the Ferromex locomotive was pointed outward.
By now we were into high sun and harsh light time but that wasn’t going to stop us from chasing and photographing the 189.
We got it on the north side of Collinsville, Ohio, and then got into place to do the grain elevator shot at Seven Mile.
It wouldn’t be the same composition as earlier with the 25A because the sun had shifted to favor the other side of the former Pennsylvania Railroad tracks.
The clouds had also thinned a bit and we got plenty of direct sunlight as the 189 came rolling past the elevator.
With that we headed north and managed to get the 282 at Eaton. I would catch one more train, the 142, at Conley Road northwest of Eaton before calling it a day and heading home.
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