Hinsdale Railfaning

When I went to take pictures of the Oak Street Bridge, I noticed a headlight in the west. So I waited for the train. I went to the west end of the north platform of the Highlands Station. The train was a distributed power unit coal train. I'm learning that I should have been on the south side so that I would have had better lighting.

20140603 0013c

Note that the train "wiggles" about 14 cars back. That is because it is crossing over from the south track to the middle track. Freights normally run on the middle track because of all of the commuters on this line. But they are replacing the ties under the middle track so freight trains are being forced to use the other tracks.

The time stamp on the photo of the lead unit was "11 hours ago". I was expecting accuracy to the nearest second.  Fortunately, the pictures are still on the camera, and it does display the time with accuracy to the nearest second. The lead went by at 12:03:00.

And the pusher went by at 12:05:13.

I knew the platform was too close to catch the whole locomotive, so I was just trying to catch the number. But I failed for the second unit. And I can't find the number in any of the other shots.

I need some more practice. In particular, I should try holding down the shutter button and allow the camera to take four pictures per second. I see the paint on this one is H3 and the other two are H2.

I found http://www.thedieselshop.us/BNSF.HTML, so we have:
5724: ES44AC, #5718-5747 are pre-production GEVOs
8960: SD70MAC

As I mentioned before, I'm almost as interested in the freight cars as I am the engines.

Actually, I was also taking a picture of the pedestrian crossing since this station does not have a nearby street crossing.

We bid our train goodbye.

I digitally zoomed in on the engine to confirm that they have the wrong lights on for a rear unit. Instead of the headlight, it should have two little red lights on. Or maybe leaving the ditch lights off is good enough.

The following picture of an eastbound commuter that is pushing is displaying the red lights that I was expecting.

A couple more shots of the pusher since I don't see that every day.

And coal cars as far as you can see under one of the new signalling bridges. Again, note the "wiggle" in the train.