Nostalgia & History > Searchlight Signal Sunday: after the gully-washer

If you’re a student of weather & storm formation, you know. If you’re a tornado chaser, you know. If you grew up anywhere on the rural American plains you’ve seen & lived this a few times. Start-to-finish this event is usually over with in 20-30 minutes. Daylight suddenly grows very dim and the low clouds overhead start boiling in nasty looking purple/black tones. Hard & unpredictable gusts of violent wind start up. A vicious fist-fight occurs between the wind and the clouds. Then the rain comes hard & fast! In just a few short minutes over an inch of angry water crashes heavily onto the ground. It’s what you’ll swear is “the hardest rain squall I ever saw”!
 
Then comes that magical few minutes right afterward. The war is over, and the brawling combatants move on, with all of that rancorous energy now spent. All around the regular sounds of an interrupted day come back on line. In the now dead-calm the birds bravely start to sing again & the sounds of mankind reestablish themselves in your ears. Overhead the mean, ugly sky has changed to give off a weird light. It’s an almost sickly yellow, back-lit & fueled by a blazing sun. It presents to us the atmosphere with a sharp clarity seldom seen. Automobile headlights and RR locomotive headlights alike take on that eerie, piercing electric blue tone.

If you’re lucky (or prepared) you’ll have your camera with you AND you’ll have a suitable subject to shoot. If not, just enjoy that magical, natural aura up in the sky while you can. It won’t last long…

1. AT&SF 5680 leads train 901 O-1 through downtown Emporia, KS [five minutes after “the heaviest rain you ever saw”] on June 17, 1978.

Thanks for looking back!
Lance Garrels
santafe199



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/08/22 20:38 by santafe199.

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Lance

Great picture and what a way to describe a late spring Kansas evening 
jtk

highmiles Wrote:
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> Lance
>
> Great picture and what a way to describe a late
> spring Kansas evening 
> jtk

Second that  motion! Beautiful image and a marvelous description of something that all of us who children of the heartland have seen many times. For a train watcher, those moments after the storm can be magical. But before and during, oh wow. Dorothy and Toto would surely agree.

MC
Columbia, Missouri

Lance you forgot one minor sense... Smell. Any Kansan will know that upon such a storms impending doom, when the smell of the rain is imminent and the skies are growing darker and darker, inevitably someone nearby will always have mowed their yard. The smell of fresh cut grass wafts through the air and somehow God gives an awesome show. Your shot there in the summer heat however would include the smell of creosote and all things railroad related. Foregoing the sense of smells, I do have to say one of the most interesting sounds I ever heard was when I first hired on the tie gang and was sitting in Gerlach Oklahoma in the siding in July of 96. Having made it into the hole to clear up for an eastbound stack we stopped and climbed up the nearby hill to await the trains departure. Beings we were stuck there for an hr, the machines were shut down. In the silence (the head end being several hundred feet away) the train started moving. Picking up speed, the nights rail grinding operation became apparent as the sound of the smooth wheels picking up speed on the freshly ground rail (on a curve) became almost like a song. That is one sound I've really only heard one time. No flat spots, no clicks of a joint, just a long train picking up speed. Eventually the rear end came by, no DP units, just the fading of the train and whispering rail slowly returning to silence. Randomly, tie plates popped and snapped back into place, even the roadbed itself almost letting out a sigh that it could relax for a short time. Meanwhile I was just sitting back, taking it all in. Guess that's a perk of being young and having ones ears undamaged to hear all that.