[Check out our photo gallery from the day.]
I’ll again pass the mic to Henry to recount our rail adventures. —J.
On Saturday, we woke up early and went to a bridge we had scoped out the previous day to watch the empress go by on its way out of town. We waited for a while when it came thundering by! I managed to get some really cool shots of it.
After that, we embarked on a 2-hour-ish journey to Lufkin, TX, where we would meet up with my friend, Israel, and see his amazing collection of railroad signals and related items. When we arrived, we first noticed how brutally humid it was. The next thing we noticed was all of his amazing displays.
He and his family welcomed us in and we began looking at everything he had around, including but not limited to: railroad signals, an tornado siren, insulators, traffic lights, electric meters, and about a million other great things.
After seeing his train layout and grabbing some lunch, we drove out to the local railroad to see the last remaining signals from the 1950’s and 60’s. There, we found an abandoned relay case, where we grabbed some old electronic railroad relays. We explored and abandoned caboose before moving on to our next destination, a bit outside Lufkin.
When we arrived, we found two incredibly intact 70+-year-old diesel locomotives, built by Baldwin, a manufacturer that has been defunct since the early 1960s. We also stopped by another industrial plant to see their very small switcher locomotive, which of course had cattle horns mounted on the nose (it was Texas, after all). We went back to their house and said our goodbyes, and headed back to Shreveport. All in all, it was a fantastic day!
