| It had been a really, REALLY bad day. I had missed photos ops on three trains, my navigator and chase director had gripped about any and everything during the chase, and the overcast had pretty much made mucky gloom out of all of my photos. About 8pm, I was fed up and heading for home. I saw a green block signal on Abutment Road, so I pulled up to the McFarland Road crossing and waited to snap one last photo of whatever came around the corner, figuring it would probablly be an old ugly GP38-2 the way my luck had been running. To my surprise (I almost dropped the camera) an NS and CSX freight came rolling down the parallel mainlines, side by side. This is not a staged still shot, these things were moving along! In my 15+ years of rail-chasing in Dalton, i've never seen this happen before. Anyway, the NS was moving faster (about 35mph), and he got to Hair Diamond, three miles to the north, first. However, as CSX usually takes precedence, 4768 was allowed to go through first. This photo just goes to show that good things come to those... |