Crazy nights!

[jettrainfan]

Ok, your at a mall, shopping for your sister, then your dad calls you up talking about taping the polar express. What are you gonna say?! Well, that was my situation today, i had rode it yesterday. I said yes, praying(i actually did!) that the rental was gonna run. Well, no chance we would catch it at rockside. So we sped towards peninsula. If you have ever chased an engine , your 2 main problems, people, and other people that are doing the same thing. We were too late to find it coming in but it over ran again(im so lucky for once!). I heard from my grandpa that it was a Six truck and a 4 truck. Now, right their your thinking "WHAT THE?!" He said it was a FL9 so i took a geuss he made a mistake. I was wrong, when he told me the class was made for new york city for electricity, that caught me off guard. anyway, here it is... http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=285652&nseq=1. Of course, my dad gave chase and it was like steam days. It was dark but I got some good shots. Well, where does the crazy part come? well, lets say you were driving the lead unit (this case, #800) and saw a kid taping a train at 8 P.M. I think that would be crazy. When we got to the bridge (just after the yard, about 1 mile from rockside) It happened, i was watching something and i turned around to find a cop car behind my dad's car. At first i got mad,(i was thinking of the time at Triskett...) but couldn't help but laugh. I wanted to walk over but how is he gonna know i got a cam corder and not a gun? so i stayed on the bridge. For humorous reasons i taped the cop car passing by. According to my dad, the cop was telling him it wasn't a good area to stop so he had to turn around at the other side. If a cop asks you what your doing and you say watching trains, 98% hes gonna say "what?" and the fact it's 8:45ish doesn't help. So it was a crazy day and something i didn't expect. If you want, you can put your strange days here.

[NarrowMinded]

Back in 1986 when Halley's Comet was making its rounds a friend of mine went to the desert to get a better look, He found a nice spot skirting some tracks, Problem is a freight rounded a sweeping turn and it appeared to the crew my friend was parked on the track. He went into full emergency stop.  after it stopped one of the crew walked over to my friend and explained what had happened, I asked my friend if they were mad, he said no they were more thankful they had not hit another idiot that had stopped on the track. he said their only concern was getting the air for the brakes back up to pressure. my friend said after that seeing the comet was anticlimactic

NM

[jward]

my crazy night story was in late 2000. we had come th shelocta to take an empty coal train back to etna. the power plant had assembled the train for us already, so it should have been as simple as pulling forward far enough to clear the pocket, letting the helper come out and attatch to the rear of the train, then taking off down the line.

unfortunately, somebody had messed with the train. every time the head end got the air pressure up, there was no air on the rear. we had to walk the train several time looking for angle cocks that were closed, cutting off air flow to the rear of the train. there were at least 5.

then, the fun really began. the same person had gone back through the train pulling the uncoupling levers at random. every time we'd start to pull the train would come apart somewhere. of course when it did the air hoses would come apart and we'd have to recouple and pump up the air all over again. it took us over 8 hours to get out of the power plant that night, and we ended up parking the train just outside the gate for the next crew.