It was a beautiful morning in Pensacola. Q602-11 had made a mostly nocturnal run from Mobile-Pensacola over the PD and M&M Subs. He got a new crew, and the train was ready to leave town around 8:00am. I thought he had a tier 4 leader based on the radiator I could see as we crossed over the Fairfield Drive overpass. I got down to the bluffs expecting full cloud cover as well. Soon the train slowly came around the corner, as I predicted, in full cloud. For some reason that he never called over the radio, he stopped. After 5 minutes he double honked and slowly got the train back up towards track speed. As he neared me the cloud line raced ahead and cleared all of 10 seconds before he came into view screaming in run 8. I was excited to see that the lead unit was not a tier 4 GE, but one of CSX’s few remaining AC6000 series leaders, number 5016. So what I thought would be a cloudy Gevo shot on the beach quickly turned into a sunny shot of an AC6000 and a SD60 at the bluffs! Not a bad way to start off a soon cloudy, and eventually rainy Friday! Isaac Dijardin
AnnoZ Webb blog 