February 2nd, 2013 (Groundhog Day!)

On Saturday February 2nd, 2013 I decided to go up to the train station at Ashland VA to take pictures and videos of the trains, and got a total of 5 trains between 3:00 and 4:30 PM.

First up was Q702, a northbound trash train, led by ES40DC 5469 and CW44AC 407.

  

Shortly after Q702 was out of sight, Q416 called the signals at Elmont and put in an appearance behind ES44AC 712 and SD70MAC 4775.

As Q416 called the Defect Detector in Taylorsville (5 Miles Away), Q439 (had an abortive attempt at getting video for this) called the Defect Detector at Taylorsville as well, and it had a good lash-up on it too- ES44AC 873 and "Diversity In Motion" CW60AC 699.

After Q439's passage, there was a small break in the action, in which all I heard on the scanner was a conversation between the dispatcher and the engineer on another train. At about 4:25 Q409 called the signal at Elletts (one signal up from the "North Ashland signals to the north of the station), and it had an EMD leader as SD70MAC 4812 and C40-8W 7869 led the train south. It should be noted that the 'X' on the nose's logo was missing.

And on the way home (almost gave up on this train since it was moving so slowly), I got a real treat as Q438 (northbound counterpart of Q439 seen earlier) had an SD70ACe leader as the 4841 and C40-8W 7309 led 42 cars northward past Hunton. This train got a "limited clear" signal at Elmont which would mean that it would be changing from track 3 to track 2 (there is no track 1 on this line).