Next-generation rail photographers
Thirteen-year-old me got a stern bit of unsolicted trackside advice one day. “Railroading isn’t what it used to be. Everything looks the same and you have no idea what it was like before your time.” Another voice, some time later, said today’s wide cabs will be as glorified as the bygone days of GP9s — one day.
Trains Contributor David Lustig piqued my interest after reading his online article, “The railroad and its equipment will always be there … right?” Lustig talks about today’s lack of diversity in locomotive types and paint as he speaks specifically of the phaseout of Amtrak F59HIs, once the staple of Amtrak’s California passenger trains.
This got me thinking about how railroads are changing in the East and how railroading is grabbing the attention of a new generation. “Millennial” railfans and rail photographers are taking an interest in locomotives and/or paint schemes that are now endangered and weren’t of concern just a decade ago.
In 2008, it was totally normal to spend a day trackside on CSX and catch numerous pairs of matching “Bright Future” yellow, blue, and gray locomotives — the CSX corporate scheme beginning in the 1990s until 2002, when a darker blue and yellow scheme, dubbed “Dark Future,” was introduced.
Today, rail photographers — myself included — burn through a tank of fuel and spend a couple hours behind the windshield for the opportunity to photograph the 1990s paint in the lead of a freight train. What was once common practice is now the unordinary, and those subtle changes over time keep us coming back trackside.
Keeping in line with the theme of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List — the scale that measures the vulnerability of biological species — another vulnerable candidate earning a spot on railroading’s “Red List” would be Amtrak’s aging fleet of General Electric Genesis P42DC locomotives. Built in the 1990s, the P42DCs are 20-plus years old, and the passenger railroad is taking measures to replace them with new Siemens-built ALC42 Chargers. P42DCs are quickly becoming the F40PHs of a previous generation.
And to make it more interesting, Amtrak refreshed its corporate paint scheme, debuting Phase VII in April 2022. It is the seventh standard design in Amtrak’s 53-year history and is already being worn by new ALC42 Chargers, as well as P42DCs that come due for repaint. This makes Amtrak’s classic Phase V-wearing, Genesis-series P42DCs even more endangered, as Chargers enter service on the national network and older locomotives are retired or repainted.
As peculiar as it sounds reading out loud, the Phase V P42DC is becoming as symbolic as the Phase III F40PH.
But just as Lustig reminds us, perhaps sooner than we realize, the Chargers will one day be the sought-after locomotives of America’s passenger trains.
It’s a cyclical process that continues appealing to new generations of railfans and rail photographers with evolving subject matter interests.
Get trackside and find what makes you happy. Or as late Trains Editor Jim Wrinn would have said, “Get busy livin’.”
