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.

10/18/17

This is an image of Topeka, Kansas that I shot one evening while at my work conference.  The window at the hotel I was staying at actually opened and fairly wide too.  My room was on the 7th floor and this was the view I had to the north.  To the east it was great for watching the full moon rise which will appear in a photo soon.  😉

2/9/16

So I felt like some color today.  We are in the dreary blah part of the year where everything is just brown.  This was something quite lovely and colorful I got to see late last summer.  I went to the Huff N Puff Hot Air Balloon Event in Topeka, Kansas.  This was their Balloon Glow Event where they got the balloons filled and lit up with the fire from them.  It was quite beautiful and neat to see when they choreographed the lighting of them to instruction and some music.  Just looking at them all glowing was quite nice. 

12/6/15

Well, the wind died down, that's great.  Even though it was in the 50s it made it pretty chilly to be outside.  This image comes from Halloween Day when it was a bit chilly out as well and the railroad I volunteer at was having their Santa Run.  We had a couple of surprise guests.  This is Wylie Coyote riding the train being engineered by one of the owners.  Kung Fu Panda is right behind him though he can't be seen in this image.  It was a fun time for our last run of the season.

11/17/15

Well we finally got a decent rain to head us into winter.  Today is dreary again so I decided to share a pop of color.  This is from the Topeka, KS Huff N Puff hot air balloon event I was able to attend a couple of days.  This was on the second evening when they were doing a flight demonstration.

10/12/15

It's a beautiful day!  Wish I had had the day off to be outside.  This image is appropriate because I wanted to be off enjoying the day all day instead of working.  I took this at the Huff and Puff Hot Air Balloon meetup in Topeka, KS last month.  It was neat to be able to see hot air balloons up close and in flight. This was a rather colorful one and I was bale to get it with it's burner going.

9/21/15

What a dreary morning we had today.  I decided to share something colorful because of it.  This is another image from the Huff N Puff Hot Air Balloon Event I got to attend.  Was it just last weekend?  Seems like an age ago.  Anyway, this is from earlier in the evening than the other image.  The propane burners were going on these 2 balloons as they were being inflated for the Balloon Glow portion of the event which was just beautiful.  So colorful and lovely to see.  

9/15/15

So I was able to check off one more thing on my Bucket List this past weekend when I went to the Huff N Puff event in Topeka, KS.  I had always wanted to see and photograph a Hot Air Balloon.  I had seen them before but never up close and never where I was able to get a shot.  So Saturday evening, I was still in Topeka because of doing some steamy stuff.  That evening the balloons were supposed to fly again and as there was not much wind at all I thought it was probably a good chance to see one.  Sure enough, shortly after I arrived at a spot near where they were they began to take off.  It was lovely to watch.  The one on the left had it's burner going making it glow a bit.  I liked seeing them and it would probably be cool to ride in one but not sure I could ever do that so seeing them was good enough for me!  :-)

9/14/15

Well, heading back into the heat this week.  I was kind of hoping we were done with that but we aren't.  This past weekend was quite lovely.  So I mentioned that I got to do something neat a couple days ago and here is an image from that.  I went to the Huff N Puff Hot Air Balloon Meet Up in Topeka, KS on Friday evening.  Unfortunately the wind was too strong for them to fly that evening, it was 10 mph which I found funny as that is nothing for Kansas most days.  Anyway, they did what they call a Glow Event which was very beautiful.  In the evening they inflate the balloons and then use their burners to make them glow.  It was like balloon fireworks and very lovely to see.