Steam & Excursion > UP 4014 Heading West in Palisade Canyon

I travelled to Palisade Canyon between Carlin, NV, and Beowawe, NV, to shoot UP 4014 on its westward journey and spend a couple of days camping and exploring around Palisade. As mentioned in my post from July 19, my plans were cut short due to the Royal Fire burning near our place on Donner Summit. Fortunately, I did get to see 4014 rolling by. There were plenty of fans on hand in the canyon, though surprisingly you might not know it from the photos and video I shot just west of Tunnel 1 and the adjacent bridge over the Humboldt River.
 
I used the PhotoPills app on my phone to determine where I wanted to shoot. With a 10:30 AM scheduled departure out of Carlin, I estimated that they’d roll through the canyon around 10:45, give or take. The app allowed me to pick a spot where I’d get a little nose light on a westbound train in the morning, aided by the fact the tracks run nearly due south in this part of the canyon. The app was spot on for 4014’s arrival at 10:50 AM. It’s not a free app, but I’ve found it invaluable for my photography planning. (It includes a virtual planner with integrated mapping with Sun, Moon, astrophotography, field of view, depth of field, filter requirements, etc.) I started doing this virtual planning as soon as the schedule was announced, and it ultimately led me to make the trip to Palisade.

I have to say thank you to Ed Dickens, the Union Pacific Heritage Operations team, and the Union Pacific Railroad for making this happen. The locomotive and train were gleaming. They didn’t have to do it, but they did, and they put on a great show.

Photos 1 and 2: UP 4014 is running west on Main Track 1 of the Elko Sub in Palisade, NV. It’s emerging from Tunnel 1 at MP 525.2 and crossing the Humboldt River. This is on the former Southern Pacific mainline through the canyon. In the wider angle shot, Tunnel 40 of the former Western Pacific mainline, now Main Track 2 of the Elko Sub, is seen to the right.

Video: I didn’t leave the full recording of the train’s approach in the video, but I did leave in an extra 45 seconds or so at the beginning. Clearly most everyone on these boards is interested in railroads and likely gets some endorphins, excitement, etc., from an approaching and passing train. If not, I doubt we’d be engaging in this peculiar hobby. Hearing them lay on the whistle almost continuously while running through the upper part of Palisade Canyon approaching the town of Palisade made the hairs on the back of my neck stand as the sound echoed and reverberated off the canyon walls. It sounded surreal in 2024. I was born decades after mainline steam disappeared from the rails in America, but I felt connected to the sounds that my father would have heard during his first decade plus growing up near the four track Michigan Central mainline of the New York Central. (So turn up the volume!)

Continued…

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Bonus Shot: I hadn’t planned on following 4014 further west, as I wanted to explore Palisade Canyon more and camp for a couple of days. But, after speaking to my wife about the situation with the Royal Fire, I quickly hit 80 and headed west. As I caught and passed the train, I was amused at hearing every defect detector throw off a hot box warning as the locomotive passed. Modern tech that’s incompatible with a steam locomotive. I decided I was out in front of it enough to grab a shot of it just east of Golconda, NV. I stopped to shoot it off Crocker St., presumably named after Charles Crocker, one of the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad.
 
Cheers,
Sean

Side note, aka rant…I was finally able to share the video because we're back to the land of high speed internet after spending most of the past month at our cabin. My wife and I love spending time at our cabin, but the monopoly hold AT&T has on the area results in us getting 3 Mbps DSL service at a monthly rate that’s more than we pay for gigabit fiberoptic from Sonic in the Bay Area. Yes, I understand economies of scale, but the US lags in highspeed internet access among developed nations, and the lack of rural broadband is a one of the issues. For us it creates challenges for remote work up there. It’s yet another example of the stranglehold that large investors have over various sectors of the American economy that impacts customer service in the name of investor profits. (See the parallel here?) Furthermore, when they initially sold me the service, they sold it at a higher advertised bit rate for even more money than we’re currently paying. After finally getting a tech out due to our modem constantly cutting out and giving us security certificate errors, he informed me that we were paying for a service that was unattainable at our location. That, my friends, is corporate greed. It’s possible for AT&T to make additional investments to improve service in our area, but instead they’ll continue to milk the cash cow monopoly they have and fight any national, local, or community driven initiatives to improve service or create competition that will drive down costs. While a rather insignificant personal problem, I've never been able to upload an ~200-400 MB video to TO from our cabin without the WAN modem quitting on me. End rant.
 

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Wow! Photo one is truly an excellent image.
Bob

Nice photos, great area.  As an aside I use a T-mobile home internet box or whatever they call it.  A visitor said we have great speed but we are close to a tower. 
All the cell phone types offer that but not available everywhere.  My nemisis was Verizon where I always got stuck with an expenisve plan and where I live now poor service.

DSl is at the end of the line(smile) and like home phone lines probably a money loser for T.  .

Spectrum offers cable  but we get all we need with Roku and rabbit ears.

Bob

Thanks Bob(s) for the comments!

Our place is in Serene Lakes, south of Soda Springs and in the shadow of some smaller mountains and glacial moraine escarpments from Interstate 80. We can tether to our iPhones and use them as T-Mobile hotspots and sometimes get better performance than the AT&T DSL, but it's not super reliable. (The grounded metal roof on our place acts like a Faraday cage, so service can vary as you move around the house and throughout the neighborhood, for that matter.) I've looked into a 5G mobile hub from T-Mobile, and technically they're not available in Serene Lakes. That said, I could order one for our primary address and take it up there. Apparently a lot of folks do stuff like this for their RV's, cabins, etc., even though it violates the terms of service for the device. I suppose T-Mobile doesn't care all that much, so long as they're getting paid.

The crazy thing is, where only about a mile from the railroad over the ridge. Remember SPRINT, Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony? Yeah, there's a major fiberoptic trunk line running over the Sierra Nevada a mile from our place, which, ironically, is now part of T-Mobile who we have mediocre mobile service through.

We also discussed Starlink, but after seeing our neighbors dish get absolutely obliterated by the snow and a cornice that built up along their roof-line, we decided to pass. (Their dish was literally in pieces on the ground come springtime. Donner Summit is not a forgiving place in the winter!) I'm also not keen on giving Elon Musk any of my money.

robj Wrote:
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> Nice photos, great area.  As an aside I use a
> T-mobile home internet box or whatever they call
> it.  A visitor said we have great speed but we
> are close to a tower. 
> All the cell phone types offer that but not
> available everywhere.  My nemisis was Verizon
> where I always got stuck with an expenisve plan
> and where I live now poor service.
>
> DSl is at the end of the line(smile) and like home
> phone lines probably a money loser for T.  .
>
> Spectrum offers cable  but we get all we need
> with Roku and rabbit ears.
>
> Bob

Oh my gosh, great echo sounds coming from the canyon!
I'll have to watch video again with earbuds on to hear the full echo effect.
I first watched your video on my phone, while I was in a semi noisy area, and didn't hear the first echoes from the phone speaker, so I was wondering why the long wait to see 4014 come out of the tunnel, but now I understand, after reading your description.
Thanks, great video.

Jim Baker
Riverside, CA

The whistle has an ethereal sound through the tunnel.  Haunting.

Wisely let the diesel do the work through the tunnel.  All that diesel snot on the ceiling would have come down on 4014 if it had been blasting through.

Just listened to it with earbuds, Fantastic multi demention echoes!

Jim Baker
Riverside, CA

Nice catch, thank you for sharing. I often wonder if someone is capturing these many unique moments along the way.

Posted from iPhone



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/24 18:37 by EdDickens.

Love the visible details of the train on all your shots, and thanks for posting the 2nd shot, wide angle showing both bores and bridges.

I try not to dictate to others how videos are supposed to be composed, because there are countless way to share the experience. So I hit "play" and enjoyed the video before reading your description. So thanks for that 45 seconds of anticipation! 

Thank you, glad you enjoyed this.

When I first read your post about not dictating to others how videos are supposed to be composed, I thought you might have been considering that the framing was a little off, which it was. Upon rereading your post, I realized what you were getting at. The sound and how it built anticipation was too good to leave out, but I wanted others to know it was deliberate. (I did omit about another minute of sound of the trains approaching whistle.) Regarding the framing, there was a lot of distracting traffic going back and forth on Palisade Ranch Road that I was trying to keep out of the scene. I underestimated the height of the train at that spot and should have tilted the camera up a bit more, or have gone a little wider with the field of view, or leveled up and narrowed the field of view, etc. With what is a difficult if not impossible scene to rerecord, the framing I used on this video makes me a little bonkers. (Own worst critic situation.)

cchan006 Wrote:
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> Love the visible details of the train on all your
> shots, and thanks for posting the 2nd shot, wide
> angle showing both bores and bridges.
>
> I try not to dictate to others how videos are
> supposed to be composed, because there are
> countless way to share the experience. So I hit
> "play" and enjoyed the video before reading your
> description. So thanks for that 45 seconds of
> anticipation! 

Glad you enjoyed it, Jim. It was almost ethereal being there and hearing it echo through the canyon as you anticipated its approach. Such a great auditory experience that was so commonplace 100 years ago but just isn't today. When walking around my neighborhood, I try to tell my kids to remember the sounds of the diesel Caltrain locomotives rolling by. It's a sound that will soon be (mostly) ending on the Peninsula.

RailRat Wrote:
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> Just listened to it with earbuds, Fantastic multi
> demention echoes!

Thank you for sharing the background on your images and
video ... nicely done!  The whistle sequence is truly 
captivating ... something special about that unique sound ...

Much appreciated!

Odyssey
Evergreen, CO

Excellent!  Thanks for sharing that.

-John

Excellent pair of images, and a fine video!
GK

Great post!!