Tracking the Light has occasionally featured Conway Scenic Railroad’s former Maine Central GP38 No. 252. As Conway Scenic’s manager for marketing, I’ll admit that—yes, I like that locomotive. As I’ve often said, it was delivered just one week after I was.

Among my tens of thousands of color slides is a Logan slide box (a metal storage box) labeled “Colorado and Utah.” It is filled primarily with images exposed between the summer of 1995 and the autumn of 1998, when I was making regular trips to the Rockies.

While searching for another photograph, I came across these Fujichrome Provia slides exposed on September 1, 1996, depicting a Southern Pacific empty coal train in the yard at Minturn, Colorado, on the Denver & Rio Grande Western’s west slope of its Tennessee Pass crossing. Leading the train is a relatively new GE AC4400CW, No. 252.

I exposed these just a few weeks before the Southern Pacific system—including the D&RGW—was formally absorbed into Union Pacific. The brief wink of sunlight was fortuitous, while the foreboding sky seemed prophetic. 

Nearly thirty years later, is Norfolk Southern approaching a similarly pivotal moment? I wonder what things will be like in 2056?

Tracking the Light posts thoughts on railroad photographs.