Blair says:
"A trip to the BN east of Wenatchee on November 7, 1981--a Saturday afternoon in the late fall, and four of us--I know Brian Ambrose was along, perhaps Tom Carver and Robert Getchall as well?--drove out in the early morning from Seattle to catch the Coulee City Local. It was rumored to still be operating with F-units, the last few still running on the BN in the Northwest after those assigned to Vancouver, Seattle and Auburn were all parked by late July.
"Intelligence was correct: four F9A's were teamed with a "GP10" rebuild, and we caught up with them switching in Coulee City. Disappointingly, the geep was on the point, and no matter how much pleading, grovelling, and begging we did, the crew wasn't about to run the power around the wye to appease us. Bummer. It was the last time I saw BN F's in service. We took a couple shots of it leaving Coulee City headed into thickening cloud cover, and decided to leave it at that.
"We decided to head south a half hour to the former GN mainline west of Stratford--certainly we'd get some traffic and we did, scoring a few trains in nicely muted afternoon light.
"Here's one of the westbound: nothing fancy, just a trio of SD40-2s from the last batch BN acquired, I believe, less than a year old. They're going over the east switch at Adrian, which at one time was a junction and interchange point where the former Northern Pacific between Coulee City and Wheeler crossed over the GN.
"This was about as vanilla a set of locomotives as you could find on the BN at the time, but I'm glad I bothered making the shot. And to think we gave up a GP9/F9A/F9A/F9A/F9A set on a local for THIS!!!"
And for reference, the shot they got on the CW:
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