Back to Railroad Monitoring

The Rose Festival Express was not known to me
until a good ham friend called me a few days earlier and asked if I was interested. I am interested in Railroad scanning and travelling on Amtrak. The main purpose for me to ride on and be interested in trains is the photographic opportunity to visit places that never see an automobile - just a stretch of tracks far out, twisting around a river canyon or something. So I agreed with my friend and told him I'd be the Red Bluff lookout to take pictures and video and announce the upcoming arrival into Redding 30 minutes later.

The train consisted of 2 E-unit engines and a power car, as well as the full suplement of specially painted and designed UP passenger cars. Each car was named also with the name showing proudly on the side of the train.

E-9 locomotive header (E-951 engine number)
UPP 207 - power car
E-9 locomotive
Cabarton - staff car
Columbia River - sleeper
Cheyenne - business car
Feather River - business car
Stanford - business car
Sunset - business car
Promontory - exercise car
Green River - sleeper
Wyoming - sleeper
Powder River - sleeper
Walter Dean - dome lounge
City of Portland - dome diner
Fox River - track observation car (look inside and you notice the seats are stadium style so all in the front of the car can still see out the back window.)

You may view the train passing by on the 1:40 sec quicktime video. I shot this using a Canon Digital Camcorder and then compressed using Quicktime Pro and Final Cut Pro.


Soundtrack of the train coming through - stereo FULL quality with doppler effect - nice whistles (580K)
T-1 quality movie (5.5MB)
ISDN quality movie (2.9MB)
56K quality movie (1.2MB)
28.8K quality movie (756K - NOT WORTH IT AT ALL :)

Will automatically load with Quicktime plug in.