Prototype Railroading: Night

I thought, for this week, I would share a few night photos.  Railroading goes on day and night, and so a lot of what we do happens in the dark.  Lately, they have been trying to run as many trains as possible during the night in order to leave the days open for maintenance.  Only a few trains have run each day, yet at night there is a steady parade of freight trains in both directions.  Lately, I have not made a lot of runs to Forsyth.  I put myself on the brakeman's extra board.  Since the trains to Forsyth do not usually need brakemen, I almost never go there now.  I like it that way!  Instead, I have been working on work trains, helpers, and various yard assignments.  Most of the following pictures are from work train assignments.

This photo, and the following two, were taken from the second locomotive on the train.  When there are three people on a crew, the engine can get a little crowded.  As the brakeman, I really did not have much to do when were moving, so I went to the second unit, put my feet up, and read a book.  During the time in the second unit I also took a minute to take a few pictures.

In the photo above, the train is approaching Horton, MT, where we had to stop and pick up a few cars loaded with ballast.  Ballast is the gravel that the railroad tracks sit on.  The cars were going east, and we would pick them up and deliver them to Glendive.

This picture is only about a thousand feet past where the picture above it was taken.  In the above picture, we were just coming along side the ballast cars we had to pick up.  We eventually pulled past them, and then packed the locomotives down on them, coupled in, and then put them on the front of the train.  Once that was done, we continued east.  The following pictures were taken a couple of days later, on a different work train.

We got stopped at Tusler, MT, to meet a westbound grain train, and it began to thunder.  I decided to try to take a few pictures.  Most came out just black, but the photo above is one where lightning struck just to the left of the frame, leaving a neat glow on one side.  There was a lot of lightning, and in the next thirty seconds following that photo, I got the next few.

Above, I managed to capture a bolt of lightning.  There was no fancy camera work on this, just a lot of dumb luck on a regular old camera.  We were still moving when this was taken, so it did get blurred a bit.  Normally, I would see something like that and figure my luck was not going to get any better, but I had plenty of time to kill, and again, I was sitting in the second locomotive, so I figured I'd try a few more times.  The storm was not going anywhere for a while, and neither were we!  I was glad I kept trying, because of the result below.

Once again, no fancy camera work, just a lot of luck.  By the time I got this one, the train had stopped moving.  I got several really neat pictures during that thunderstorm, but this was, by far, the clearest.  The lightning was less than a mile away, and it was repeatedly hitting in a field to the north of the tracks.  I tried taking several pictures, and after many attempts, I got lucky with the above photo.

Now, one more photo, before dark, but in the evening:

In this photo we were picking up gravel cars that were going to a cement plant.  I had just been dropped off at the end of the train to put the end of train device on and then start a walking inspection.  The locomotives would go back to the other end, couple on, and then once all the inspections were done, we would pull the cars the few miles from the gravel pit to Glendive yard.