Black Smoke

On July 3, 2009, Southern Pacific 4449 launched its first leg of a 7 day journey to the mid west on July 3rd. It's route was from Portland, OR, to my current town of residence, Spokane, WA. Given a long love affair with this locomotive (that started when I was only three years old), I couldn't pass up the opportunity to foam at her.

Nearly five hours after first intercepting her at the Oregon border, we are starting to close in on home territory.

Here we get ahead of "The Pack", which stopped in downtown Ritzville, WA, a few mies down the track, and found ourselves a quiet little crossing all to ourselves.

The engineer was kind enough to give us a little black smoke to make our photos look more impressive.

(c)2009 - No permissions granted for the use of this image without prior written permission from me!