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Grand Trunk Western Symbol Freight 391

On January 7, 1996, I was on a whirlwind winter ramble on the southside of Chicago with Mike Abalos and his friends.

At 1:55pm, we stopped to photograph Grand Trunk Western symbol freight 391 that had stopped near 103rd Street awaiting permission to continue its journey toward Clearing Yard.

Standing at the 103rd Street grade crossing, I made this telephoto view on Kodachrome using my Nikon F3T. A few minutes later GTW 391 resumed its westward journey.

Last week, I scanned this slide that had been stored in the original Kodak box along with two dozen other images from the same trip. This is part of my on-going organization and archiving of my slide collections.

Canadian National GP40-2L 9461 leads westawrd freight 391 near 103rd Street in Chicago on January 7, 1996. This scan shows the Kodachrome image full-frame. At the time of exposure, I didn’t leave much room for cropping.

Tracking the Light looks back 30 years!

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Canadian National Rock Train at Byron, Wisconsin.

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Call this, ‘today’s lucky pic!’

I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, so I randomly selected this slide from a group of 600-plus 35mm color slide that I’d initially gathered as material for a book on EMD diesels.

This slide didn’t make the cut.

Nor was it labeled.

So, I called up my 1996 photo notes and looked up the relevant details.

At the time I was living in Waukesha, Wisconsin and working for Pacific RailNews.

On the morning of July 27, 1996, I had driven north (railroad timetable west) along the Wisconsin Central mainline toward Byron following a northward freight.

At Byron it met two eastbounds, the second of which was this Canadian National rock train led by Grand Trunk Western former Detroit, Toledo & Ironton GP40 6404.

CN had worked out an arrangement to run its rock trains over WC. Notably, this was several years before CN acquired Wisconsin Central, and at the time catching GTW locomotives on the WC was a novelty, if not unusual.

Working with my Nikon F3T with 105mm lens, I exposed this slide at f6.3 1/500 at 741am. I noted that this was my ‘full daylight’ setting for Fujichrome Sensia 100.

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