The Napa Valley Wine Train

My wife and I were in northern California recently. I was there for a conference in San Francisco and we decided to have a little vacation and see the redwoods. We went north to Eureka and spent a few days touring. The redwoods are amazing and so are the coastlines. Eureka is the northern end of the defunct North Coast Railroad and there are several Geeps rusting away in Eureka. I think the closest engine was a GP7 and the rest are GP9s.


We spent a few days in and around Eureka and then headed down to Napa. I wanted to see the ex CN FPA4s on the Napa Valley Wine Train. As it happens, we caught up to the Wine Train as it was heading back to Napa. It does not go very fast so we were able to leapfrog it a few times.


I tried to include the surrounding scenery with the Wine Train.


Fortunately there were quite a few vineyards. NVRR 71 and 70 were the power.


I took one video of the train going by.

We left off the chase after that, as I didn't want to subject my wife to any more railfanning while on vacation. :)

I did go visit the shops later that evening to see the other engines. I stored the photos here in a gallery and recorded some information about the Wine Train on my web site.

Grand Forks Elevators and Industrial Locomotives

I swear, this will be my last post on Grand Forks for a while! I know it seems like that's all I post about these days.

On Sunday March 28 I went in search of grain elevators. While I was out, I had the good fortunate to stumble across three industrial locomotives as well.

The first elevator I came across was the North Dakota Mill.

It is quite an impressive structure. The sign says the company has been in business since 1922.

The mill sits at the south end of an industrial park, with quite a few rail-served industries. Farther north is Minn-Dak Seeds.

A BNSF line goes north-south right beside the plant.

Just north of that is a gas storage site, and then I came to Gavilon Grain.

Hey look! A locomotive!

In fact, it's Con Agra 477.

It's a high-hood GP7, ex Belt Railway of Chicago. Very nice! There's a couple of photos of it on RRPictureArchives.

Just a bit north of that on the same property was this little beauty.

Peavey #2 is an EMD SW7, ex Atlantic Coast Lines, built in 1950. RRPictureArchives

I was just about out of time at this point, so I headed south on highway 29. As I came to Gateway Drive I saw a bunch of ex-Clinchfield hoppers at the Strata aggregates facility... with a locomotive.

Here's engine 230 (an SW9) from a long way off. I wish I had had time to walk across the field to get a closer look but I fell back on the telephoto to get a few quick shots. Maybe next time!