SeattleRailFan's video: Two trains meet on the Seattle waterfront 10-31-2013

On a cloudy but reasonably nice fall day, I'm on the Seattle waterfront to catch a train. The pedestrian overpass at Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park gives me a birds-eye view of the BNSF mains. This shoot turned out to be full of surprises! BNSF 4677 (C44-9W) comes around the curve with a northbound stack train. The first pleasant surprise was seeing a KCS SD70MAC in their Retro Belle color scheme in the lashup. Just as it appeared, I had a most unusual interruption. A still photographer came up on the overpass and set up next to to me to shoot a model against the city skyscape. You can hear them yammering the whole time I was there. The train slowed and came to a stop. I didn't know why, so I went to the other side of the overpass to see what was going on. Once there, I could see that they had stopped so the conductor could detrain and line the switch to put them into the D8 siding next to the grain terminal. The train was going to wait on the siding until it was their turn to continue. Since there aren't any intermodal yards north of here, I assume this train originated in in either Seattle or Tacoma and will be headed to Chicago. Then I look up and see a southbound freight approaching in the distance. Excellent! The stack train throttled up and headed into the siding. I'm no expert, but the engineer had a nice touch on the throttle and started his train with no jerking and banging as the slack was taken up. BNSF 6712 (ES44C4) led the southbound past us on Main 2. Another surprise was seeing a Canadian Pacific loco on that train. Don't see those very much around here. There was one more nice surprise to finish off the video. As the stack train finished entering the siding, I caught the utility job from Balmer Yard doing his work. He lined the siding switch back for mainline movement after the stack train cleared. Great shot of him operating the switch if you want to see how a switch works. The "utility job" is a guy in a truck that can place himself at various places in and around the yard to assist train crews in lining switches, setting out cars and such. In this case, without the utility job to help the conductor would have had to wait at the switch, line it back then walk a mile back to the front of the train. And that ended another great day of Seattle railfanning! Stack: 4677 / 789 / 5166 / 4192 / KCS 3920 C44-9W / C44-9W / C44-9W / C44-9W / SD70MAC Freight: 6712 / CP 8794 / 7154 / unknown ES44C4 / ES44AC / ES44C4 / big and orange