Ridin' the Locomotive

I posted an item earlier about our chance encounter today with my wife's cousin who on his weekends is a conducter and locomotive engineer for the Fillmore & Western Railway. The previous post came from my cellphone, so I was limited in what I could write. Here are the details.

We were on our way to visit with my father-in-law in Santa Paula and were running about an hour early, so we stopped in Fillmore to see what was going on at the railroad. It's a tourist operation that runs local weekend trips in the area, dinner trains, mystery trains and special holiday runs. We noticed a switch engine heading our way, so we stopped to watch it pass. I took this shot with my cellphone:
As the train passed we looked up in the cab and saw that my wife's cousin was driving. He didn't see us when he first went by (he was looking further down the track). As the engine backed up on a different track we stood there and waved as he went by. He did one of those cartoon double-takes and waved back. We walked down to where he had parked the engine and he climbed down to say hi.

He told us they had some switching to do and if we wanted to ride along for a few minutes we could climb up in the cab with him. It didn't take long for me to say yes.

Here's Engineer Larry at the throttle:
We spent about 20 minutes in the cab as they moved some cars around in preparation for their noon run to Santa Paula. We have an invitation to ride up front for the entire trip next time, so we'll have to plan to do that. Way too much fun.

I took some cellphone video, but for some reason my video program won't work with them. Next time I'll have a regular video camera.