It’s been a hard day. Not a bad day, but a hard one. We had the memorial service for Wendy this morning, at the same shrine where we held her funeral. Anniversaries are the hardest. Even at one year on, the wound is still quite raw.
But it was heartening to see how many family members turned out, both to the memorial, and to the barbecue we held afterward at my father-in-law’s house.
In other news, yesterday my father-in-law took me out to the Burlington Northern switching yards in Lincoln where, as you can imagine, there are a lot of trains. Actually, you’d sort of have to imagine it.
Lincoln is the hub where most of Burlington Northern and Union Pacific’s operations pass through. Burlington Northern runs over 50 coal trains through the city each day (a number that’s expected to increase to 112 in five years or so). I had a perfect spot to photograph one of these behemoths passing through, but none did, in the hour and a half that I waited. I did get some interesting switching action, but the cars were too far away to take good photographs of them. Oh, well. That’s the way things go.
As you can expect, post 9/11, a Burlington Northern official drove over to check us out. We explained why we were there, and he said that he had no problem with us watching the trains, as long as we did it on the other side of the “No Trespassing” sign, so that the railroad could avoid liability issues. He was very polite and wished us well.
Despite seeing no behemoth coal trains, I did get to see some trains being assembled, and it wasn’t too hot to stand around in the sun for an hour and a half. My father-in-law also had a friend on that street, who paid us a visit, and then took Wendell indoors for a few minutes of friendly chit chat. Maybe next time, I’ll be able to catch some interesting photographs. I’ll show you what I did capture, when I get home and can download the shots from my camera.