A Georgia Evening at Jesup

All the photos from this day can be found here.

CSX Transportation; Jesup, Ga.; December 15, 2013

In mid-December my mother needed a car delivered to her in Florida, so my brother Bruce and I drove to the Sunshine State with some photography along the way. We'll be bouncing around with different parts of this trip for a few posts, starting with what was actually the fourth day of the trip. The morning of December 15, 2013, was spent in Augusta, Ga., (more on that in a futire post), then we headed over to the CSX main line at Jesup, Ga., for the evening. We had ATCS Monitor running on a laptop, and as darkness fell we could see on the display that there would be a northbound and southbound train converging on Jesup shortly after sunset. The southbound was closer, so we set up for that, but it was held north of town for the northbound. This required us to figure out a good northbound shot given our lights were more oriented for a southbound. Soon the northbound appeared as the last glow in the sky was vanishing.

CSX Transportation; Jesup, Ga.; December 15, 2013

CSX; Jesup, Ga.

We set up near the railfanning platform just south of the station and shot the train going away (top photo in this post). The passing stack cars allowed us to test the lights for the southbound train, and produced some interesting images themselves. Once the northbound was out of the way, the southbound appeared and we got the shot we had originally set out to get (below).

CSX Transportation; Jesup, Ga.; December 15, 2013

Amtrak; Jesup, Ga.

We knew a northbound Amtrak train was in the picture, running about an hour late, so we relocated to the "Welcome to Jesup" arch just north of the station. Shortly after the freights cleared, Amtrak made its station stop. ATCS Monitor also indicated a freight was running north as well; once Amtrak had finished loading and was out of the way, we stuck around for the same composition with the arch.

The northbound could be heard blowing its horn for the crossing just south of the station. We manned our cameras, and as the locomotive came into the scene we clicked the shutter (below). We were a bit surprised to get an Amtrak train in the photo -- our "freight" turned out to be the northbound Amtrak Auto Train! With nothing else showing on the computer display, we tore down our equipment and headed into Florida.

Amtrak; Jesup, Ga.; December 15, 2013