Posted By steam5 on 02/24/2009 2:17 PM
I’m 90% sure Union Pacific use their restored FEF and Challenger today for normal revenue (freight) service if it needs to get from A to B. Can anyone clarify this?
Do they do the same with 4449 today?
Way back in 199x something U.P. 844 pulled a passenger train to Chicago (a National Railroad Hysterical Society meet of some sort) and came through Cedar Rapids. It was fun watching go through pulling the passenger cars. The track-side crowds were huge and unruly and it was a general fiasco as far as I am concerned. But I could not help but wonder what it would look like putting a freight consist.
I have to say that I missed what I think would have been an "award winning" photo as it went by... I take photos of steam engines only as I don't much care about what it pulls and even less if it is passenger equipment... so I shot off almost the whole 36 pic roll of film as the engine went by at about 40 MPH (I have been accused of having an auto-wind on my Pentax K1000 SLR, but I don't, I am just very fast at flipping that lever!). I was stepping down from my perch (a short concrete foundation of a grain bin) as the last car passed. The last car had one huge flat picture window on the back end of it, and there, standing in the center of that window, was a small girl of about 5 or 6 in a pretty pink dress holding a Teddy bear, watching the track come from under the car! Perfectly lit with the mid afternoon sun shining directly in the window as the train headed east. Several people complained that they were out of film at that point. I had just two frames left and as I was raising the camera to get the shot of a lifetime, some FOOL stepped right in front of me and I got a photo of his arm, two feet in front of my lens, raised to wave at the little girl! ARGGGGHHHH!.
By the time I got past him the little girl was running from the window back deeper into the car and all I got was the back of the car with a vague shadow of a figure in it. ARGGGGGHHHHH!
The return trip for the engine was not well advertised, but I happened to learn the schedule and found it was coming back through here and I decided to take a day of vacation and go wait for it. I was very pleasantly surprised when it came through to see it had a couple dozen odd assortment of boxcars and hoppers in tow. There was no caboose (that I remember... I was too excited to see the steamer in the first place and quite shocked to see the freight cars). I yelled, "Hi Steve!" and the engineer turned and waved, then blew the whistle a couple of times. I have no idea whether it was Steve Lee or Bob Krieger at the throttle, but he waved anyway!
I don't know what happened to the passenger cars it took to Chicago (and I don't care!) and I have no idea what kind of merchandise was in the consist it was pulling west, but it sure was pretty!
But, yes, I have seen U.P. 844 pull freight! Glorious!