Operating a Running Locomotive During Shutdown

This morning, we did a short hike in Montpelier to Hubbard Park.  I'll write more about that and share some photos in another blog entry.  After our hike, we went to lunch at Sarducci's.  Next to Sarducci's is a single railroad line used primarily for transporting granite.  The kids were hoping we would see a granite train coming through the city while we were there.  The chances of this happening are very slim but, who knows?  Maybe we could get lucky...

While eating lunch, we heard a train coming through.  Unfortunately, we were seated on the porch overlooking the river on the opposite side of the building where the railroad tracks are located so we couldn't see the train.  We did hear him...  we heard the rumble of the engine...  we felt the vibrating building as the train passed by...  we heard the horn...  and we heard the clanging bell as it slowly crept across streets.  The kids were kind of bummed that we couldn't see the train making its way through downtown Montpelier but at least they got to hear it.  

In this first photo, we are walking along the siding track that runs through downtown Montpelier.  This is next to Sarducci's Restaurant so we walked along the tracks from the car to the restautant and then back again to the car after lunch.

We had already decided that we would visit the Montpelier Junction Amtrak train station so we headed that way after lunch.  By the way, lunch was delicious, as always, and the service was great too.  

Our plan was to just familiarize Lukey and Kenzie with yet another Amtrak train station, nothing more.  Montpelier Junction was on our way back home so we pulled into the station's parking lot to make the short walk to the train station.  We figured this should take no longer than about five minutes...

When we got out of the car, we immediately noticed that a couple of the diesel engines were running and an engineer was running around the locomotive.  We all thought that this was pretty cool that there was a running engine to see at the station.

As we were walking past the GP9 engine (the green engine pictured above) as the engineer was shutting it down, the engineer called out to us and asked if we wanted to get up into the cab!  We jumped at the opportunity and went over to the engineer to introduce ourselves to him.

Lukey climbed the ladder to the cab first.  It was funny...  he had been belly-aching about being tired after our short hike up to Hubbard Park and the tower so he didn't want to do any more walking but he suddenly found all sorts of energy to climb up the ladder on this big diesel engine!  

So, we got a little tour of the cab and the kids got to actually blow the horn!

Lukey was saying, "This black handle...  or this one?"

The kids, and especially Lukey, were very happy that we decided to make this short stop at the Montpelier Junction train station.  It was a great experience for all of us and even Kenzie seemed to enjoy this unexpected diversion from our intended plans.  

We were very lucky to have happened to cross paths with this engineer as he was shutting down his engines.  He was actually the engineer that had just run through Montpelier past our restaurant too!  He was friendly and seemed to really enjoy showing us the cab as he was shutting down. 

We talked for a bit about railroad museums around the country that each of us had visited over the years as well as our cross-country Amtrak rail journey.  Now that was a journey that we loved and would love the opportunity to do again sometime.  

Okay...  Lukey and Kenzie are getting a bit impatient for me to finish this blog entry about their unexpected adventure today so I should close this and publish it.  I'll write more about the rest of our day sometime soon.