After my employer's home office moved to another part of town I rarely end up driving along the inbound TE's route as in years past. Tonight I was on the road to the market and noticed that it was "about that time" for the southbound TE to be entering the city limits. I drove to the main chasing stretch and saw that the signals were ripe for an inbound Eagle. Even though I was aware of the inbound signals the train snuck up on me anyway. I'm still getting used to the change over to silent running along this stretch after every single crossing was modified to quiet zone specs.
Unfortunately it was just another generic UP safety cabbed unit train. No biggie because this time I had the Amtrak tracking map to fall back on. Right away I could tell that the tracking map wasn't exactly mobile device friendly. Luckily my phone was powerful enough to run it anyway. I also noticed that the inbound route for the Texas Eagle is missing from the map. It also only updated at seemingly random frequencies that were at least five minutes delayed themselves.
That being said the tracking map still proved rather helpful since it gave me reasonably recent confirmation that Eagle was sitting still just outside of the immediate area. You could say UP was up to their old tricks but I decided to stick it out for a bit. Just before I ran out of patience here comes the Eagle just like old times, except that now it's in silent running mode.
I must admit that the lack of horn makes it easier for the trains to sneak up on you and it also takes something away from a rail fan chase experience. I understand why they city is doing it and I wouldn't hold it against the folks who live near the line, but I still miss it. Regardless of the specifics when the chase was over I had a grin on my face and a bit of wanderlust in my thoughts, so mission accomplished in that respect.
While there are some aspects of the tracking map that take a while to load or don't quite work the way I'd like the overall improvement over what we had before is huge. Over time I hope Amtrak continues to fine tune their tracking map and make it easier to use in the mobile world so that it's simpler to track your train while you're on the move. Should be interesting to see what's still to come.
I would be "lost" without your maps.
