Afton in northeast Oklahoma, 183 miles south of Kansas City and just across the border from Missouri, is where the BNSF line that heads south from Kansas City joins their Springfield, Missouri to Tulsa, Oklahoma main line. Both lines are former St. Louis-San Francisco or Frisco track. The junction at Afton was important in Frisco days and it remains important today, with in excess of two dozen trains through Afton on peak days of the week, more than ran through here during the last days of the Frisco. Intermodal trains from St. Louis, Birmingham, and Memphis for the West Coast run through Afton as do many manifest trains from Kansas City, St. Louis and Memphis that are headed to the busy, former Frisco hump classification yard in Tulsa. And the power is an amalgam of what is on the BNSF roster with a mix of newer and older AC and DC units. This program shows over twenty-four hours of action in and around Afton and nearby Vinita in April of 2012. “BNSF around Afton, Oklahoma” is 1 hour and 15 minutes in length and can be watched with or without narration. 

If you want to see the greatest show in freight railroading in this country, head to the BNSF main line between Chicago and Los Angeles known as the Transcon. In northeast Missouri around Ethyl, the former Santa Fe, Chicago to Kansas City portion of the Transcon, known in past years as the Airline and Speedway, encounters rough terrain that necessitated many cuts and fills. As trains surmount the hogbacks between the river valleys there, they encounter grades up to eight tenths of a percent and curvature that limits trains to between forty-five and fifty-five miles an hour for many miles and even slower speeds on the grades. Several wooden bridges giving overhead views of trains have brought railfans to this scenic part of northeast Missouri for decades. This program shows over twenty-four hours of awesome action on BNSF’s Marceline Subdivision, part of the BNSF Transcon, in northeast Missouri in April of 2012. And Union Pacific trains between Los Angeles and Chicago use this line also, a condition of the Burlington Northern – Santa Fe merger. “The Transcon in Northeast Missouri” is a two disk set and is 2 hours and 20 minutes in length.  This DVD has the option of being watched with or without narration.

“UP’s Central Corridor in Eastern Iowa” shows over 24 hours of action on UP’s Clinton Subdivision both sides of Belle Plaine, Iowa in April of 2012. Part of UP’s Central Corridor between Chicago and Ogden, this former Chicago and North Western main line hums with activity in spite of the downturn in traffic due to the recent recession, the warm winter, and UP’s penchant for running longer trains. UP recently added centralized traffic control to this line along with double crossovers about every ten miles. Wayside signals were also added, doing away with the North Western’s left hand current of traffic running. Belle Plaine is 111 miles west of Clinton and 86 miles east of Boone. In contrast to most of the former North Western main across Iowa, the line east of Belle Plaine has several restrictive cures and grades as it heads into the Iowa River Valley at Belle Plaine. “UP’s Central Corridor in Eastern Iowa” is a two disk set and is 1 hour and 47 minutes in length.  This DVD has the option of being watched with or without narration.

The Clinchfield Railroad, now part of the far flung CSX system, which runs through the Appalachian, Valley and Ridge, and Blue Ridge geological provinces of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina rather than around them, is considered to be one of the best engineered rail lines in this country and certainly one of the most spectacular in the Eastern half of the U. S. CSX’s Blue Ridge Subdivision, the southern half of the former Clinchfield, extends from the former headquarters of the Clinchfield at Erwin, Tennessee, to Spartanburg, South Carolina, a distance of 137 miles. Half of that distance is spent ascending and then descending the Blue Ridge. This video shows portions of four days and one night along CSX’s Blue Ridge Subdivision between Erwin and Sevier on both sides of the Blue Ridge including the famed “loops”, in November of 2011. Once a bridge route for Florida perishables into the Midwest and a route for locally originated coal to get to power plants in the Southeast, today this heavily railfanned line with some of the best scenery in the East is a corridor for coal from mines in Kentucky and West Virginia to power plants in the Southeast. The Blue Ridge sub is also CSX’s testing ground for distributed power or radio controlled slave unit pushers as all unit trains over 75 cars utilize distributed power, the only part of CSX where DPU has replaced manned pushers as of the fall of 2011.  Length = 1 hour and 45 minutes.  This DVD has the option of being watched with or without narration.