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We decided to make another trip up Stevens Pass on October 9, 2016, to see the fall colors and railfan. Our opening shot is just past Gold Bar. Passing through Gold Bar we spotted a lot of MOW work going on and that always bodes poorly for rail traffic. However, on the scanner I heard one of the men talking about moving things out of the way for Amtrak. This was well past the time that the Empire Builder should have been through there so my hopes were a bit elevated.
When we got to Skykomish the first sight was the fuselage train parked on the siding. Normally this combination Boeing train and vehicle train has priority so I assumed that the MOW operations were taking precedent and he was going to be parked there for a while. There was no sign of a crew in the engine either.
A few days prior to this, I downloaded ATCS Monitor onto my desktop at home. This is a great program and can be obtained through the ATCS Monitor group on Yahoo. It does, however, have a lot of bad URL’s and port addresses, so if you try it and it doesn’t work, just keep trying different things. I finally got the Scenic Sub to work.
By uploading TeamViewer on to my desktop and downloading the app on my iPhone, I was able to look at the dispatcher’s map of the Scenic Sub on my phone while in Skykomish. I could see that a train had just come through the Cascade Tunnel and the signals were green at Scenic, WA. A few minutes later, the red turned to green on the main through Skykomish. Listening to the scanner I could hear the track detectors as the Empire Builder made its way toward me.
A five hour late Empire Builder finally came around the curve and passed by the fuselages giving me a nice video. This video has a lot of scanner audio and I included a screen capture of the ATCS dispatcher’s view so you can see the locations of the track detectors and mileposts along the route. The audio was edited for time. As always, thanks for watching and please subscribe!

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