Travel report : North Carolina - 08-22-2009

It´s only a 45 minute drive from Aberdeen to Sanford and so we took it easy this morning and left at around 11 AM. The adress was found without any problems, and yes, there still is an old SW-1200 RS!

Close to the historic depot,a steamer is perched on a piece of track. However, the state of this old Consolidation is that bad that I only "wasted" only one picture on it.

Parked on the main line was a short hopper consist, headed by a GP-10. Being the "weathering guy" at the Miniatur-Wunderland in Hamburg, this train instantly caught my eye as it had a few heavily weathered cars in it.
From the paint scheme, I first assumed that the engine in it´s former life served the Baltimore & and Ohio Railroad but I still have to dig this info out...
Isn´t this car a feast for any weathering fan :-) ?

Graffities are also one of my preferred weathering motives as they add a bit of "life" to the car!

Close to the SW-1200, a hopper was parked. In Germany, we have a saying when we want to indicate that a room is not tidied up: "Here it looks like underneath Hempel´s couch!". Well, this car was certainly in a mint condition and in no way comparable to this family...

Of course, we followed the right of way and passed a modern transloading facility for sand ang aggregate. Unfortunately, the property was fenced in and so we had to use the tele-lense.

So this was the Atlantic Western Railroad in Sanford. On we went to Taylorsville where the Alexander Railroad is located. Rumor had it that a GE-44 tonner should be parked there. The trip was interrupted by a short lunch in a shopping mall before we took on the last 80 miles of the route. After a short but heavy rain shower, I could revert to the meanwhile common 60 mph.
According to Google maps, we had to pass Winston-Salem and leave the I-40 to make a turn into NC-1610. Well, we spotted a NC-16 and a NC-90 but defenitely no NC-1610... Ok, after going on for another 5 miles we decided to make a U-turn and ask Joern´s navi. Ok, there´s the sign for Taylorsville and, hooray, the navi told me to make a left turn which I duly did. When we finally reached the end of the line, we had to state that nobody was at home. A neighbor told me that she sees a few guys humming around the building every day but she doesn´t have a clue what these men are doing there :-))
Hmmmm, looking at the trackwork showed that, judging by the rusty surface, obviously no train has rolled over the tracks for many days... So back into the car and follow the line. Just behind the town limits we saw a wide open space... with tracks neatly placed on it.
Better yet, a single (and very old) bulkhead flatcar was basking in the sun. After having documented the car and the surrounding scenery (and there´s a lot of it around here) very thoroughly, we followed the tracks further down.

So far, we didn´t see anything that resembles a locomotive. Self-propelled equipment showed up instead. In a relatively short siding, we found this two-way truck and of course had to ban it on our memory cards!
A bit further down the road, we also had a change as far as rolling stock is concerned. We were already a bit bored by the hoppers we got to see.... and here we saw a highboard gondola sitting on a spur. It was accessible and the end hatch was open. The crane at the car´s end had the sole purpose of holding the hatch open so the straw in the car could be easily unloaded.

Pepped up with new energy, we continued our way. I had to concentrate on the traffic now (there were two other vehicles on the road) when I was disturned by a loud "Uhhh-ohhhh" from my right side. Finally, a loco! And a nice one,too!! To our disgrace, it was fenced in (maybe the owners didn´t want it to escape) and so some fotos from an unusual angle were created (I shot from underneath the fence) in order to avoid the darn fence being in the picture.

We followed the line to Statesville (approx. 30 miles from Taylorsville) and finally ended up on a bridge crossing the tracks. From here, we were able to shoot some "model railroad" turnouts. Hey guys, stop telling me that the real world doesn´t use narrow turnout radii!

 

 

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