Okay, the reason for this trip was for the Michigan Association of Railroad Passenger's Bi-Monthly Member meeting, which was being held in the conference room in the second story of the Durand Depot.
Once again, I went with my mother on this trip. One of the things she does every Saturday is go out to look at Yard Sales (And she always buys more and more junk (Some cool, some worthless) whenever she does this), and she naturally wanted to look at a few sales on this morning as well, so we left early so we could look for sales on the way to Durand. Our first sale was in the Haslett area, so we went there first. As we were going over the Carlton Road grade crossing just east of Haslett, I did spy with my right eye, a headlight in the distance to the east.
This headlight turned out to be Amtrak's Blue Water, which was running late as usual. The train had F40 Cabbage 90218, four cars, and P42DC #30 pushing on the rear.
Another minute later, and we would have missed them.
Click on the thumbs for a larger picture.
After checking out the sales at Haslett, we started for Durand using the back roads, and we shortly ended up in the tiny little town of Shaftsburg, Michigan, about 5 miles east of Haslett. All that Shaftsburg really is a tiny little downtown with a Post office, a General Store/Cafe, and a small little Neighborhood. On the Railroad, it marks the Start of Double track, and is also home to a small spur. Anyway, we turned onto the road leading towards the tracks because there was supposed to be a sale down in that area (Which we never managed to find). When we went over the crossing, I noticed that the signals were lit. When I got out of the car to take a better look, I heard a horn, so we stuck around. At first I thought the train was going to be your ordinary Mainifest or Stack Train with CN Dash 9s, or at least, that's what I thought when I heard the horn, but it turned out to be THIS:
This was very refreshing. I had not seen one of these guys in a long time, and the fact that it was leading was a big bonus. I really love the Slogan "Delivered With Pride".
At this point we were falling behind so we took off for Durand.
We got there just in time to catch the Same DWP Freight coming around the Chicago wye.
The train was only about 23 cars long, and seemed a little bit too overpowered in my opinion.
I'LL FINISH THIS LATER...