Railfanning At Sacramento Station¶
So recently, I went with a group of friends up to the Sacramento Amtrak station to see some trains. We had hoped to see a bunch of Amtrak trains and some Union Pacific freight trains.
Ultimately, we did see a Union Pacific train (yes singular), so if you're here to look at the train, here's some pictures of that train. However, there was an issue with Union Pacific's rail bridge, so we actually only saw a single freight train. I'll get into that more after the pictures of trains.
Okay, now time for the full story.
So, when we got to the station, we got off our Amtrak Capital Corridor train at around 11h (11 AM), and we were due to return at 17h40 (5:40 PM) so we had a bit of time to see some trains.
Aside from the Amtrak train we were on however, there was not a single bloody train in sight - we waited for hours.
In fairness, my friends and I are rather new to Railfanning, so we were spending a lot of time fiddling with our radio scanner to get the right frequency.
There were a few false starts where we thought we would have a train coming only to realize we were on the wrong frequency.
However, we were able to eventually get the right frequency and figure out that there was a train headed our way!
Soon, the train you saw in the earlier pictures pulled up at a signal and stopped. Initially we thought that perhaps this was due to an Amtrak train headed our way, but no - we waited another hour and a half with no movement.
At this point we had to get some lunch, so we headed into the city, however on our way back we noticed something odd. There was a rotating bridge that served both road and rail traffic - however it had an alarm bell ringing, which seemed to indicate that it was attempting to turn to allow marine traffic through.
The only problem was, the bridge was not turning. It would try and move a few centimeters every so often, then get stuck and give up.
Well - that certainly explained why the train was not moving. Surely this bridge however could not be broken for long, we thought. It had already been out of service for several hours, so Union Pacific must be aware of the issue and be fixing the problem.
Oh, if only.
We went back to the station where the train was still there. Now, we waited... and waited... and waited some more. At this point, it was getting close to dark, it had started raining and the wind was blowing quite hard. To top it all off, it was freezing cold.
In total, we waited over five and a half hours for this bridge.
To put it in perspective, here's what it looked like when we first saw the train.
Here is what it looked like when the train actually started to move.
By the time they actually started to move, two Amtrak trains had gotten stuck on the other side of the bridge and wound up coupling together so they could cross faster.
Unfortunately, I only have this blurry picture to prove it (hands were frozen numb at this point).
Anyway, my complaining aside, I was able to get a video of the train departing (Please ignore Skibidi Toilet Man™ at the end).
We did get to speak with some Amtrak staff who were super cool, and gave us a hornshow from one of the new Siemens Chargers as they departed.
So to wrap this up, I guess we were just extra (un)lucky to have this happen on our first railfanning trip - hopefully future ones will have more trains.