It's 2am, and I've been standing in the rain for 45 minutes all setup waiting for the last freight train to cross the 80 year old Historic Milwuakee S Curve trestle. Even with really good intel, nailing down an exact time when a train is to arrive can be tough and my patience paid off. In a little more than 36 hours from the time this train crosses the trestle, the last Sounder train will run north and the books will close on the trestle.
In a single long weekend, the old steel girder bridge over G street will be dismantled and then the new one moved in to place. Once both ends of the new bridge are connected to the existing track, 80 years of service will come to end for the trestle. Also under construction is a new Passenger station just under construction, the platform of which is just barely visible in the Freighthouse Square buildings, All passenger trains through Tacoma will move to this station and the new Bypass-Bypass route some time in 2017. Once the concrete bridge is complete as a single track structure, the wooden trestle will be razed and the second half of the concrete structure built. The end result will be a two track bridge, a portion of which is visible just to the left of the locomotives.
A continuously growing album of photos that IMHO reveal the awesome and seldom-seen beauty of the railroad world from the dimming of day to dawn's early light! From dusk to dawn, trains roll on! (I'm still finding gems of sunset-to-sunrise surprises!)