Western Railroad Discussion > Patience Prevailed Along the Truckee River (Donner Pass)

Anyone on this site that has had the benefit of using actively monitored ATCS servers (either through ATCS Monitor or TrainMon5), or that had the required ATCS software, layouts, and radio receivers, is likely lamenting the recent or impending loss of this tool for railfans.

Just two years ago there was coverage on Donner Pass from Sacramento through Roseville to Auburn, Fulda/Switch 9 to Shed 10/Cisco, Shed 47 to East Truckee, and Reno through Sparks to Vista. This combined with a scanner, Railroad Radio Truckee, and several webcams made for efficient Donner railfanning when tight on time. I could pop out for a shot I had pre-planned, grab it, and get back home to my cabin in a short period of time.

All ATCS monitoring on Donner has now gone completely dark with UP's cut-over to new communication protocols. We're now back to the pre-ATCS days. Catching a train now requires finding one on the route and getting in front of it, watching signals, finding a train in the hole for a meet, hearing a detector or dispatcher conversation and having a sense of which way a train is headed, etc. I'm bummed because given time and family constraints this will unfortunately reduce my opportunities to get out to photograph trains on Donner. (There is of course the option of seeing a train on a webcam and acting upon it, but that isn't too different from hanging trackside.)

There are still feet of snow on Donner Summit from Norden down through Emigrant Gap, and it's not the "pretty" kind. Things have mostly melted out down in Truckee, however. I was therefore interested in getting a shot at a familiar location along the Truckee River that I've shot before but wanted to try from a different vantage point and angle, so I headed down to Truckee yesterday morning, Monday, May 29th. There is usually a fairly reliable parade of eastbound trains over Donner Summit in the morning, so lacking any insight from ATCS I hiked to the spot I wanted to shoot and opted for a stay and pray strategy. After waiting for far longer than I had initially planned, the Railroad Radio Truckee feed alerted me to an eastbound train when the detector at MP 203.9 sounded for Main 1. I was minutes away from packing it in, but my patience was rewarded with these shots of an eastbound manifest

Photos 1-3: Led by a clean looking UP 7221, an eastbound manifest with dynamic brakes humming winds downgrade along the Truckee River on the east slope of Donner Pass.

Continued...

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Photo 4: UP 2696 was the sole DPU bringing up the rear.

I have video that I need to get on my Mac and edit that I also hope to post.

Cheers,
Sean

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Relly nice location and great composition.  We all hate the passing of ATCS...

Jerry
ATSF5669

Excellent shots!  The 3rd one is perfect.

texchief1
RC Lundgren

Very nice with the train, river and snow capped mountains in the background.  
Is the road above the train Glenshire Drive?

Gerry

That's correct Gerry. I almost always like spots that have reverse curves, especially if they have nice scenery and I can get some elevation on them.

Some other shots from the same location but different vantages:
https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,5539746,5539746#5539746
https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,5496605,5496605#5496605
https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,5056001,5056001#5056001

Cheers,
Sean

SPB Wrote:
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> Very nice with the train, river and snow capped
> mountains in the background.  
> Is the road above the train Glenshire Drive?
>
> Gerry

Always love the eastside coverage! The loss of ATCS coverage on Donner has made it more difficult to chase trains. Radio chatter and maps from inside sources are the best resources. That is unless you have a direct line to Boilingman in Dutch Flat to report eastbounds as they roll through :)

Great series!

broken_link Wrote:
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> Just two years ago there was coverage on Donner
> Pass from Sacramento through Roseville to Auburn,
> Fulda/Switch 9 to Shed 10/Cisco, Shed 47 to East
> Truckee, and Reno through Sparks to Vista. This
> combined with a scanner, Railroad Radio Truckee,
> and several webcams made for efficient Donner
> railfanning when tight on time. I could pop out
> for a shot I had pre-planned, grab it, and get
> back home to my cabin in a short period of time.

Appreciate your coverages of the Donner trains during the ATCS "Golden Age" even if I didn't comment on many of your reports. And thanks to the Truckee River shots here.

While I had the privilege to experience ATCS foaming with a fellow railfan who had it setup, I never got into it myself, primarily due to my "non-reliance" on cell phone data. I considered a mobile remote setup but realized the limitations (antenna's limited range at ground level) even though I was ready to modify a scanner to stream ATCS data into my laptop. So I stuck to pre-ATCS tactics.

Bigger hit to Donner railfanning is reduction in traffic, and changes implemented in the PSR era. For example, I used the Amtrak schedule and caught the trailing westbounds on "slow" Sundays, ZCSLT (became the ZG2LT), ZNPOA (ZG2OAB), KMNOA, IGxOA, MRORV ("Roper"), and AGBMI (MROMI is the equivalent) mixed in somewhere. During the summer, KGxLT (x= G1, G2, G3, or whichever Global in Illinois) might show up in daylight.

Eastbounds would get ready in Roseville in the afternoon, usually no-grainers (empty grains, sometimes 2+) followed by QRVNP (and/or QFRNP), MRVRO, MRVNP, and others. This was after 2009 when stackers migrated to Donner running. I'm sure I forgot to mention a few more trains. Anyway, that was good for almost a decade.

I see signs that PSR is becoming less schizophrenic, but the lack of traffic and predictable patterns are what's making Donner train hunting time consuming now.

SCUfoamer Wrote:
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> That is unless you have a direct line to Boilingman in Dutch Flat
> to report eastbounds as they roll through

Or his timely credible rumor that made ~3 hour driving worthwhile. :-)

Traffic on The Hill seems rather erratic these days. Some days they come east, one after another. Once in a while there’ll be a surprising number WB’s, never outnumbering EB’s, but noticeably more than usual. And, of course, there are those days when a guy could starve out there (yesterday was on the quiet side).
I don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, and I have no idea as to train symbols, I’m just talking casual observation- living trackside.
SR

As has become the routine since retiring, I’ll be going amphibious here in a few weeks- heading South for the life aquatic. Happy hunting everyone!

Ah! I hear an EB grinding up from Gold Run right now…



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/31/23 07:03 by BoilingMan.

cchan006 Wrote:
> While I had the privilege to experience ATCS
> foaming with a fellow railfan who had it setup, I
> never got into it myself, primarily due to my
> "non-reliance" on cell phone data. I considered a
> mobile remote setup but realized the limitations
> (antenna's limited range at ground level) even
> though I was ready to modify a scanner to stream
> ATCS data into my laptop. So I stuck to pre-ATCS
> tactics.

I definitely "cheated" when it came to using ATCS. I didn't have a radio setup and I was using a Mac, so I had to run the ATCS Monitor using Wine/Homebrew/XQuartz (pre-Catalina where 32-bit apps were still supported) running the existing Roseville Sub layout that had active hosts streaming data. Once I upgraded my machine to Catalina or Big Sur, I had to shift to using TrainMon5. I found that this also worked well on my iPhone, and that was super handy given the decent cell coverage along I-80 covering much of Donner Pass.

> Bigger hit to Donner railfanning is reduction in
> traffic, and changes implemented in the PSR era.
> For example, I used the Amtrak schedule and caught
> the trailing westbounds on "slow" Sundays, ZCSLT
> (became the ZG2LT), ZNPOA (ZG2OAB), KMNOA, IGxOA,
> MRORV ("Roper"), and AGBMI (MROMI is the
> equivalent) mixed in somewhere. During the summer,
> KGxLT (x= G1, G2, G3, or whichever Global in
> Illinois) might show up in daylight.
>
> Eastbounds would get ready in Roseville in the
> afternoon, usually no-grainers (empty grains,
> sometimes 2+) followed by QRVNP (and/or QFRNP),
> MRVRO, MRVNP, and others. This was after 2009 when
> stackers migrated to Donner running. I'm sure I
> forgot to mention a few more trains. Anyway, that
> was good for almost a decade.

Like BoilingMan said, things seem to be hit or miss these days.

Many days will see two or three eastbound stacks (ZLTG2, ILTG2, IOANP), but often only one or two westbound (ZG2LT, IG2LT, ZG2OAB).

The AMICH or whatever its current incarnation is seems to show up regularly. I've seen westbound autracks quite a bit as well, but those might have been running a manifest symbol last I heard. (MROMI, iirc) There are all of the eastbound empty unit trains as mentioned, plus three or four eastbound manifests, one or two westbound manifests, the twice weekly each way BNSF trains, and Amtrak.

So, a good day might see up to 16 trains or so. The number you get in daylight is probably half or more from what I've seen, though that's more so with the longer days in the summer, as eastbounds would often come one after the other in the early morning.

> I see signs that PSR is becoming less
> schizophrenic, but the lack of traffic and
> predictable patterns are what's making Donner
> train hunting time consuming now.

I'd like to hope that the railroads would ditch the PSR fad and get back to building business, making customers happy, maximizing capacity utilization, etc. It's not impossible to grow business and revenue and pay higher EPS on thinner gross margins, but that takes more than a quarter or two to do, and therefore it takes leadership and a board willing to do it. Whether there will be an appetite for more revenue on thinner margins remains to be seen, however. Wall Street seems to view railroads strictly as assets to funnel money, long term vision be damned.

Nice pics!!