Following Norfolk Southern’s Port Road in the evening, we knew there had been three coal trains on the move in relatively close succession.
But we didn’t know that the first train we’d seen was actually the second of the three.
To stay ahead of the parade of trains, we took a ‘new’ shortcut from Washington Boro, Pa., to Port Deposit, Maryland. Studying a map, I’d determined that with a little creative driving, I could beat Google Maps’ estimated time on back roads by taking a combination of Routes 272 and 222 to the Mason-Dixon Line.
We arrived in Port Deposit shortly after a train had passed a hotbox detector near milepost 10. Kris suggested a location for making photos from a car park on the north side of town, where the former Pennsylvania Railroad Port Road Branch rides along a fill above street level. This is opposite a row of buildings characteristic of the old town.
I was delighted that we’d beaten one of the coal trains, pleased that my ‘shortcut’ had worked so well. Except this coal train wasn’t one of the two we’d already seen. This was an extra-long train with a mid-train DPU (radio-controlled distributed power unit). The others had been singles. I was puzzled.
The DPU coal train was being held at Port Deposit, waiting for permission to enter Amtrak’s line at Perryville. In the meantime, a following train tripped the high-and-wide detector.
The minutes flashed by, and ultimately I made several sequences of the DPU train at Port Deposit. We then followed it to Perryville, only to return to find that at Port Deposit, the first coal train we’d seen hours earlier at Washington Boro was waiting, with the third of the three trains held in the darkness farther up the line. Well, that was cool, but just a little confusing. I had to annotate my notes to revise the order of the trains!
These photos represent my first sequence of the third train we saw, which was, in fact, the first. If you’ve lost the plot, don’t feel bad. Just remember that the whole adventure resulted in a lot of nocturnal images of passing coal trains.
Tracking the Light makes the most of a busy evening!