Sunday, April 17, 2016

The Stillwater Central's Dayton Job

The Stillwater Central RR runs a local job in Oklahoma City from their yard southeast of downtown (the former Frisco yard) west to Wheatland, OK and the industrial park there, and works all the industries in-between.

I believe the name "Dayton Job" is from the Frisco or Burlington Northern days, and has remained even though I don't think the Dayton plant is still in operation.

It took me some time to capture this job in action, but I finally found them working near Stockyards City in southwest OKC.  There are a variety of industries around here, including lumberyards, a gas dealer, concrete plant, and a Trinity Rail Car plant.

Here are some of the photos I got:

Pulling two-bay Trinity hoppers from Capitol Steel at S Pennsylvania.  The Trinity Rail Car facility
is directly behind me.  I couldn't tell what was being delivered with these cars.  There were conveyors for
transferring the contents to trucks.  Maybe frack sand?

The engineer kept blowing the horn because the crossing gates wouldn't trigger as he
pulled out of this spur.  People kept foolishly trying to pass on the road as he inched out.
The gates finally went down when he was about halfway through.

The Dayton Job backs up with the hoppers it picked up, backing into "Stockyards City" where
it left the rest of the train.

Here, they pulled several empty center-beam flat cars from Fox Building Supply.  I couldn't see the whole train at this point but I think from here they shoved loads back into this particular lumber yard.

A closer shot at one of the locomotives.

One last shot of the switching action.

I have some video footage that I'll put together and upload on YouTube later.  I'll post the video here when its done.  In the meantime, enjoy!

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Union Pacific Oklahoma City Switcher

Hi everyone!



I'm back from our rotational deployment to the Republic of Korea and have tons of new content for the blog.  I spent two weeks of leave in Oklahoma, where I did a good deal of railfanning (my wife is such a good sport) and I have also made lots of progress on the model railroad.  Its been challenging to figure out how to post everything and weed out pictures and videos, but here is my first compilation:











I love watching shortlines and industrial switching operations, and I think there is a shortage of stuff about this kind of railroading in Oklahoma.  So, I followed the UP's OKC switcher around on two separate occasions and got lots of good photos and videos (as good as can get with an iPhone camera that is).



This was a fun operation to railfan because most of the spurs are easily accessible from public roads.  The video explains each switching move the train made in each clip.



There is more to come, but in the meantime, I hope y'all enjoy!