Heres another one: I once hopped out of a sunroof and stood on the roof of our car at a grade crossing so I could get a shot of the motors going across the road.
Once when I was driving for big brown,I passed the NS yard in Elkhart Indiana and saw a Pennsy E-Unit.GUNGH!I did a double take,flew to the nearest drug store for a cardboard camera,and took the whole roll.Definitely not the greatest pics,but just like spotting bigfoot,people don't beleive you,they want proof.
And from the looks of those photographs well worth the effort and risk Hemmi. Most outstanding! "Still Training After All These Years"
I did EXACTLY what Hemi and AlaskaGP49 did, a few years ago, pitched a tent about 60' from the BNSF transcon. It woke me up every 10 minutes. The tent would magnify the headlight to almost daylight inside, and in my half dream-state, it sort or freaked me out, as if I was ON the tracks. I laugh about it now, but I'll never camp that close again. All because I wanted to enjoy my morning coffee while railfanning.
it was between edmonton and jasper.... been waiting for a cn train. started my camcorder and filmed the train...well, the whole train slowed down and almost came to a complete stop. this because a via rail passenger train came the opposite direction and passed 'my' cn freight on the siding. freight train was still running very slow... maybe half of walking speed. that's when i decided i want to continue my video clip from the other side of the train....so i climbed up on a procor tank car, and descended on the other side while the train was still moving. i got off the moving train exaclty as it started to accelerate again. i know this was illegal and maybe a bit dangerous. but hey, would you pass such a chance while having your camcorder running ?
Yeah, that's crazy. Back in July 1980 I signed on for an 'official guided railfan tour' of Chicago. Living in PA it seemed like a great idea, my buddy and I went out for four days of solid railfan activity in uncharted territory. We never rented a car, travelled all over by taxi, METRA, and Amtrak. One of the wildest railfan days of my life. Four of us and two guides covered the entire city from dawn to dark. I 'thought' they had advance permission, nothing could be further from the truth. Their car was obviously 'known' to the local police and railroad security folks, even then, and we tresspassed in every place in Chicago from the Amtrak yards to the US Steel plant in Gary, where our guides produced hard hats and clipboards to hide the cameras and we walked right through the plant gates. We were chased out, at high speed, by Amtrak security. We were pursued by plant security, UP security, IHB security, every shot was grab and run, though every photo spot and timing was spot-on perfect. We had two low-speed car collisions on the expressways. The driver, our guide, got two tickets for illegally parking on overpasses, and judging by the Illinois Troopers, it wasn't the first time. One overpass was at the end of Proviso. When we hit Corwith (the ATSF yard) I was actually a Santa Fe shareholder then - I showed my ID and my shareholder notification, and for the FIRST TIME we were treated like royalty instead of scoundrels. That was fun. But right after that, we set up at McCook for the westbound fleet out of Corwith, and an eastbound piggyback train snuck up from behind us at 79mph, running over the cooler full of drinks we had left beside the track (sucked it under the train, actually) and scattering us like pigeons. No pictures of that... Today, working in the railroad industry, if I'm tresspassing, the penalties are a whole lot worse for me professionally than even if I was just an individual. I'm much more aware of the danger, and of the now ability of the railroads to have remote surveillance where you don't realize it. A 'that was then, this is now' needs to be said here, and most railroads will still let you on the property with an identification and a release, and if not, simple, just don't go there on railroad property. There's enough public spots and telephoto lenses to do 90%. The only area of rail/public accidents to dramatically increase for 2006 was tresspasser injuries, which includes the handful of railfans, too. Everything else - employee injuries, grade crossing accidents, etc, was down. While most of them may be either criminally stupid acts by those individuals involved (including those stealing rides on trains), you can expect the FRA and the railroads to focus on the one area that increased, which is a blanket 'get tough' situation now.
