Tehachapi Pass Tunnel #10, Niles Canyon Caboose #209 and 7 new videos.

[GSkid]

So I went to Tehachapi Pass on December 28th-30th, 2015.

Here is the link to my thread that contains 7 new 4K videos of trains from that trip.....

viewtopic.php?f=43&t=15679


A few months ago in mid-August, I took these pictures of the beginning of the double tracking of Tunnel #10.......





These are pictures 4 1/2 months later in December showing the progress since then. You can now clearly see part of Tehachapi Loop through the cut (with the white cross on the top of the hill that's in the middle of loop) in the background of the last picture.....






Also NEAR Tunnel #10 and the tracks (This pic is facing north. The tracks are hidden just past the house and treeline of the background) is a private ranch house whose owner is clearly a railfan.....



He has the top of a searchlight signal bridge....



Apparently he somehow acquired Niles Canyon Railway caboose #209 and has it sitting on a piece of track right at the entrance to his dirt road driveway off of Woodford-Tehachapi Road.....





Here is the caboose before in Niles Canyon at Brightside, CA when NCR still owned it......



And this is when it started life originally as a Belt Railway of Chicago caboose....

[Ericmopar]

Interesting shots.
I wonder if the caboose was do for mandatory retirement and they sold it for money to get one of the steamers in operation.

[emdsd90mac]

Thanks for the post, I'll have to go up there this weekend and check out the progress.

[ZekTheKid]

Interesting shots.
I wonder if the caboose was do for mandatory retirement and they sold it for money to get one of the steamers in operation.

SP #2472 just recently got out of service for a possible rebuild.Maybe they need funds for that.And I hope he doesn't leave it there to rust away like some owners do.

[jmslakings]

Took this last weekend.

[ZekTheKid]

^The blizzard?

[GSkid]

That's the water-filled MOW tanker car that always sits there at El Rita. The snow never fell at that low of an elevation while I was there. I would have liked to have gotten a day of snowy train action video on the pass. Almost nobody posts snowy videos of this stretch of track.

That ET44AH on the head was more common than I thought there would be this soon after UP getting them. Seemed like every other UP train over the pass had at least one. In the case of my UP #2600 video, it was both on the head of the train and the last unit of the mid-train DPU set.