Got out this morning to do a little photography in southeastern Florida. I only caught one freight, but it was well worth it. And thanks to ATCS Monitor, it was a piece of cake getting into position to nab it.
Jill & I got out this morning for an hour or so. Of course, before heading out, I checked out the ATCS feed to see if there was any trains in the area. If there weren’t, we were going to hit Tri-Rail, but if there was anything in the area, the Florida East Coast was on the menu. Well, the FEC had a nice breakfast treat in store – ATCS was showing a southbound heading through West Palm Beach. So that gave us enough time to get a bagel, and get to a spot I had been looking at for a while in Boca Raton.
We got there, bagels in hand, and everything was quiet. Not long after we got there, I noticed that a nearby signal lit up, and was showing a green light. That meant the southbound was in the block and heading this way.
A few minutes later, there was a chirp on the scanner, and I could see a trio of headlights through the heat to the north – FEC train 123 was heading my way at track speed.
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Once they got into range, I got a shot of the pair of GP40s throttling up
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Then starting to lean into the curve, with a water tower in the background
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And a going away shot of the pair of geeps pulling through the curve.
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Finally a shot of the markers passing by me.
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By Florida standards, this was a short train – about a mile long string of TOFC. Not a bad morning. We hung around for a while longer, but nothing was in the area, so we called it a morning. We’ll see what the rest of the week brings.
Thanks for looking!
Tom
3 thoughts on “Easy as 123”
Tom: Very nice, know that spot well, mother-in-law lived up the road in Lakeworth some years ago. Found that curve in Boca, as you know, tough to find curves on the FEC in that part of FL.
Bill Clynes
Thanks Bill! Yeah, curves are hard to come by in southern Florida, so I had to take advantage of this one. But they do use those straightaways – can’t get mile & a half long trains doing 50 around here in New England!