Rock Springs, Wyoming: Big Boy steamed out of Sidney, Nebraska, a tad late this morning. We opted to drive west a short ways and watch it come steaming past our grade crossing. We repeated this activity about four times at successive points west. What a fine spectacle, history in motion.
The strategy was simple. The train travels 45-55 mph and doesn’t stop often. Travel on Interstate 80 has an 80 mph speed limit. So I would drive to a grade crossing, a mile or so from the freeway, we’d watch Big Boy steam past, blowing its whistle, then we’d hop up on the freeway and race west at nearly twice the speed of the locomotive, come to another grade crossing ahead of the train, wait a few minutes till it came past, and repeat as needed.
The last crossing we haunted was an overpass so we got an overhead view of the train coming straight at us and passing under the camera ... the resulting video was pure old Hollywood, like one of those 1940s films showing pretty people traveling by passenger train, maybe a Hitchcock.
I had forgotten that one constant of road trips is indifferent food, we’ve had more than our share of same. Nothing gruesome, more like meh. The best things I’ve eaten since leaving home were a Carl Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburger for lunch today, and some of the other DrC’s excellent homemade brownies, brought along as “iron rations.” I miss our RV.
Earlier I put down I-80 scenery, I need to amend that description. The portion between Cheyenne and say 50 miles west of Laramie is attractive, if not beautiful. Once you get west of Rawlins it is big, empty, and featureless. We have a relatively short drive tomorrow, to home, and some of that is quite pretty. We haven’t seen a single pronghorn on the whole trip, very odd.
