I call this one 'Rural Railroad Crossings'. A southbound manifest crawls along at 10 mph just north of Blooming Prairie. The John Deere tractor with a snow blower showed up as if on queue!

A UP manifest train heads south on the Spine Line after taking the siding for a northbound at Gordon. If it looks cold, let me assure you, it was!

On the day after Christmas, I headed over to the ex IC&E line along the Mississippi River hoping to find some blue and gold locomotives, preferably a solid set. Well, I got my wish... sort of... ... (more)

"Season's Greetings" A southbound manifest runs through downtown Bellevue on a frigid December afternoon. What an opportune time to get a big red ex CP locomotive on point! Merry Christmas, eve... (more)

Would you call them inlaws? Conrail provides a common link between Norfolk Southern and CSX in both a figurative and, here, a literal sense. It seems symbolic that Conrail 3731 is between the No... (more)

Being a railfan means ... finding beauty in a local switching job! An old yard warrior switches the Purina plant on a 70 degree November day.

I was just a few seconds too late getting to the overpass at the Clinton Yard to get a shot of a coal train coming into the yard for a crew change before it entered a shadow. I was frustrated tha... (more)

'He leadeth me beside the still waters' ... These words from the 23rd Psalm are what I think of when I see this view from the Mississippi Palisades at sunset. It was a beautiful, very quiet eveni... (more)

AMTK 27, having had work done on its nose earlier this year, leads the Illini out of Chicago and past the Amtrak Locomotive Shop on its way to Carbondale on a spectacular autumn day. ... (more)

A BNSF stack train heads east toward Chicago through a quintessential Midwest harvest time scene.

An in-train DPU heads into the sunset in the early stages of what will be a mostly night time run across Iowa towards Missouri Valley on the far western edge of the state.

An empty coal train heads west towards a sunny Wyoming sky after passing under a plains thunderstorm east of Chappell, Nebraska.

'Where nature smiles three hundred miles' - the old slogan Burlington applied to its Mississippi River route to the Twin Cities seems apt to this setting. A BNSF intermodal passes below the Missi... (more)

A southbound BNSF ore train just north of Savanna follows the old Burlington route below the Mississippi River bluffs that glisten with newly fallen snow.

EJ&E 670 is running long hood forward with a local as it winds through the snowy countryside near Peosta.