From sunny and warm on Tuesday, to cloudy rainy and dreary yesterday and back to sunny and nice today. Gotta love New England Weather – paraphrasing the immortal words of Mark Twain, if you don’t like it, wait a minute. So I headed out for my walk at the normal time, got into the car and started heading north. I was figuring on a walk around the MP7 area on the Providence & Worcester’s Norwich Branch, hoping to catch train NR-2 heading south. Hey, nice blue skies lead to nice blue water. Well, as usual with the railroads, nothing is ever really predictable. Today would drive that lesson home.
As soon as I got into the car, I did the usual ritual – put the seat belt on and fire up the scanner. Right when the scanner lit up, voices came across the P&W frequency. Damn, that meant they were nearby. I guess MP7 is out… I noticed that the Amtrak frequency was off, so I reached up and turned that on as I pulled out. I caught the end of the Amtrak dispatcher telling NR
r thing, a southbound Virginia class submarine. So I hung around for a couple more minutes – I still haven’t heard an update on Providence & Worcester train NR-2. I grabbed a few shots of her heading south, using some of the surrounding landscape as scenery props. This included the Persenk, a parking garage in New London, the escorting tug, and even a Coast Guard tugboat. Here’s some of the shots I got of her:
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As the sub continued south, the scanner came alive with an update on NR-2 – they were south of MP12 and about 15 minutes from the base. So I hopped in the car and headed north for Red Top.
I got there a good 10 minutes before the train. That gave me time to do a bit of hiking to a spot down the tracks from Red Top proper and set up the shot. I bagged them rolling past Red Top under some blue skies, and a couple shots of them rolling down the causeway between Mill Cove and the Thames River.
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Satisfied with what I got, I headed back to the office for the rest of the day.
But the story isn’t done yet! On my way home this evening, I looked to the north as I was crossing over the Gold Star Bridge. I noticed another southbound sub. Interesting that there would be 2 outbound submarines. But this one looked identical to the previous one – all the way down to the shiny black exterior. My guess is this boat is the USS Hawaii which was just commissioned to the US Navy this past weekend, and the crew is getting ready to head for their home port of Pearl Harbor in her namesake state of Hawaii. Anyways, here’s a quick shot of her from the New London side of the river.
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Now that’s the end of the story. I headed back home from New London…
Thanks for looking!
Tom
