PICKen On A Railroad

In other blogs on my page, I talk about shooting what is no longer there. What I mean is that you shot it when it was there so now that it is gone, you have photographs of a time that is now gone. In railroading circles, my main two Shot It & Now It's Gone pieces are the Extension Cord Line out of Blacksburg, SC and the now dormant Carolina Southern Railroad. Two of my failures in that regard are the now demolished Springs Mills plant in Lancaster, SC and the original Pickens Railroad that ran from the namkesake town of the railroad to a connection with the Southern Railway (later Norfolk Southern) in Easley. I only got one series of shots of that line before they abandoned it and began taking the rails up.



I can say that I have done better with the "other" Pickens Railroad, the one that's not actually in Pickens, SC, but rather Anderson, SC. The former owns of the Pickens bought this line from NS and CSX and ran it as a second division of the original railroad. They also bought what were even then rare locomotives from CSX to run the line, old General Electric U18Bs. I can say that I have shot the heck out of this little line including a trip up there this past Friday with my son where I caught two trains running.



It's about an hour and a half drive to their line from where we live and naturally, we were not making nearly the time I wanted to make, but luck was on our side as we first caught them going through Belton, SC. By the time the first train got to Anderson, I realized something was up. Both crews normally meet downtown, but the train from Belton got there way earlier than I was expecting. So it was not a great surprise when they got on the line to Anderson instead of waiting around. Here, the train passes an old textile mill that is mostly torn down --



The first train got down to an area called Gluck on the map where they met the Anderson Train and basically exchanged cars with them --







You never know when a railroad will suddenly get sold or a decision is made to sell off a line of locomotives. The Georgia Central's U23Bs are on borrowed time



and maybe we will hear word that the Pickens smaller units are asll. But if so, at least I will have the pictures from when they roamed Carolina Rails.