12/3/19

This is another image I took at the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Shops in Topeka Kansas.  These locomotives were sitting in the yard waiting to be worked on.  It was interesting to see the various paint schemes still on the locomotives like the two in the foreground from the pre-merger years.

11/26/19

Today's image was taken near the Topeka Kansas train station as well.  You can catch a glimpse of it to the left.  This Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe caboose was sitting there the day I went to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Shops.  It seemed a bit odd at the time because you don't see many around these days and in looking at my photo there seems to be something else odd with it.  I see nowhere on it in the photo that it is marked for BNSF.  Makes me wonder if it is one someone has purchased and is in the process of being delivered?  A note as well, Passenger Trains never used cabooses, they were only used I freight trains. 

11/19/19

I took this image of these Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotives in Topeka near the shops and Topeka station.  The left locomotive is painted in the Heritage III scheme and the right one is in their Executive colors.  These are both working locomotives and were running at the time I saw them.

11/12/19

I took this shot the day I was visiting the BNSF Shops.  These are a couple working Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotives that were siting by the Topeka Kansas station which is still used as an Amtrak stop.

11/5/19

I am going to do something today I rarely do and share more than 1 image for the day.  I was able to visit the BNSF Shops a couple weeks ago and found it quite interesting but others may not find it that way so I will share what i found most interesting in one day's post.  Here are the things I enjoyed seeing and found especially interesting.

Sitting in the main Shops area which used to be filled with Steam locomotives back in the day, were various locomotives in different states of repair, you can get a glimpse of a couple in the rear of the 2nd photo.  Also there were a couple of passenger cars.  This one is the William B Strong (named after a president of the ATSF railway from 1881 to 1889) which is a Theater lounge car where riders, usually executives, get a good view of the track.  I took this image with my phone due to the low light conditions and was pretty impressed with how it came out.

This Lounge car was also sitting there and was quite fancy and used for executive trips as well.

This is a view of part of the interior of that car.  Quite fancy but I was told by someone who had been in it before that it has been quite extensively refurbished and isn't as ornate as it once was.

The Topeka Shops now focus on locomotives.  In one area they do the wheels and the electric motors that are between the wheels on the "trucks"  (A chassis or framework-like structure underneath a railroad car to which wheel axles are attached through bearings.)

Then in the old Machine Shop area they work on refurbishing the huge diesel motors with giant lathes and mills.

It was all quite interesting to see and I was very glad to have been able to visit there.

10/29/19

The Santa Fe Railroad was always my favorite so when it merged with Burlington Northern that made it my favorite.  It was very cool to be able to go inside the shops in the BNSF era where the Topeka ones only do locomotive work.  They used to do a lot of boxcar work back in the late Santa Fe era.  These 2 locomotives were sitting inside the shop area waiting for some finishing touches.  In the area just beside them on the left were diesel engines being refurbished,  It all was very interesting to see.

10/22/19

This past weekend I had a special opportunity to visit the BNSF shops as a guest of a retired employee.  It was very cool to see what they do in the Topeka shops.  They repair locomotives there for the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railroad.  This is one of them being worked on in the original shop building where steam engines once sat and were repaired.  Very cool to see the old original building still in use.