LORAM Rail Grinder – Euro Styling

Last Saturday, 4/15/2017, I’d received word that a LORAM rail grinder was approaching the Houston area, southbound on the BNSF Galveston sub. Because rail grinders aren’t the best looking traffic on the rails, I didn’t worry much about chasing it down.

As it was a mostly cloudy day, I hadn’t gotten out until mid-afternoon to do some errands. We were driving west on Hwy 90-A after shooting a few images of a KCS grain train at the east end of Harlem (CP SA029-UP Glidden sub).

ATCSMon showed an eastbound approaching, but I didn’t worry about it because of the clouds. When the headlight came into view, it seemed odd. As the train passed us, I could have sworn I was looking at a European passenger train!

No time to ponder what I had just seen, I made a quick u-turn in order to attempt a shot of this odd train. I managed to get ahead of the rail grinder right before the Hwy 99 interchange. It wasn’t the best of locations, but there was a bit of sun at the moment and something is better than nothing.

BNSF symbol UCBLHOU-13 near the east switch of Harlem, TX:

That’s the best looking rail grinder ever, the polar opposite of the grungy ones I’ve seen previously. It appears to be brand-new, travelling from LORAM’s manufacturing plant in Hamel, MN to the Port of Houston for shipment to Network Rail in the UK. Network Rail is the owner and infrastructure manager of most of the rail network in England.

Views of some of the components of the rail grinder:

The decision to shoot this at a less than perfect location proved to be a wise one as a 2 minute wait at the traffic signals at Hwy 99 allowed the train to get so far ahead of us that chasing it into Houston would be a futile endeavor.