Westbound Windmill Train

Lots of traffic today along my stretch of UP’s Glidden sub, but a backlog of work precluded me from getting out during the day. It was so bad that the 0900 relief crew that got on KCS 4015 West at Missouri City around 1:30 this afternoon was still sitting there at 6:00 P.M.

That was when the DS told the crew that they would be able to go once the “wide-load special” got by him shortly.

That remark certainly got my interest piqued. Since we were already heading out to dinner, I grabbed the camera to see what luck I might have.

It was getting dark quickly, but I figured I’d be OK. I made it to the Dulles Ave. grade crossing just as the detector at MP 15.6 went off.

“U.P. detector milepost 15.6, no defects, train speed 4-2 mph, axle count 1-4-0, temperature 4-3 degrees, detector out”

That’s kind of fast when the shutter speed my camera selected at ISO 800 was 1/20 second. Time to make some adjustments or else the train will just be a blur.

The best I could do was 1/80 second at f4.0 with the ISO set to 6400. The typical shutter speed I use for action shots around here is 1/800 second, so this is going to be interesting.

The head end of UP 8581 passed me at 6:19 P.M., a mere 29 minutes after sunset.

From a distance, it looked like a pipe train. As it got closer, I thought to myself  “Boeing 737 fuselages?” Then I remembered I was in Houston, so that was impossible.

As the cars passed by at a good clip, I couldn’t really pay much attention to the cargo as I was having to concentrate on keep the shots in focus.

As the train went off into the sunset, I was thinking it was a train of sections of wind turbine towers that I had just seen go by.  But  I wasn’t positive because I’d never seen a train like this before

We got back home around 9:15 P.M. Googling “Vestas” informed me that Vestas is a Danish company, and it’s a world leader in wind turbines for the generation of electricity.

A quick trace advised me that the train was already out of Flatonia at 9:01 PM, with an ETA into Yermo, CA at 9:58 A.M. on Monday, the 24th.

I suspect that these components came in through the Port of Houston, so the symbol on this train might be something like SHOYR, but don’t hold me to that.