Railfanning Trip to Birmingham, AL - Spring Break, 2024 

This has to be the best produced - most complete railfan video I have ever watched. Keep up the excellent work.

I really enjoyed this video. I live about an hour from Birmingham. It was great to see the locations you shot. Keep up the great work. I have been watching trains since the 1990’s. I am always happy to see younger people train watching.

Great video.

Great video❤

Hey glad you came to Birmingham! Train at 31:20 looks like 29s.

Living in Alabama and traveling to birmingham often I'd never expect to see the cascade green of a Ex BN unit.

Great video! The BNSF Thundercabs and other non iso cab ACes were hated so much because of how loud they were! Later ACes were delivered with isolated cabs which got rid of a lot of that noise.

Excellent work! One train well known by Mississippi railfans is featured at 31:15. This is probably 29S and runs most or all UP power. This train and it's eastbound counterpart is the highest priority on the CKPC Meridian speedway and likely has high priority on the NS and UP. It is unique for operating over three class 1 railroads: UP could interchange directly with the NS in New Orleans like they do manifest traffic, but the speedway was upgraded in the mid-2000s to be the fastest route from Atlanta to Texas and points west. Now CSX is fighting NS for the right to run intermodal along the route to replace their current intermodal agreement with BNSF through Memphis.

Nice to see this longer production-longest I’ve seen since watching your channel and worth every minute. Glad to see you made it to BNSF rails (my heritage as my grandfather was a Santa Fe conductor and I drove BNSF crews while in ND.) The Birmingham line’s history: Kansas City, Memphis & Birmingham RR established in 1887. Then merged into the Frisco (St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad) in 1896. Frisco was acquired by the Burlington Northern Railroad (BN) in 1980 which merged with the ATSF (Santa Fe) in 1995. The empty coal train you recorded (E PAMNAM) is headed for the North Antelope Mine near Gillette, WY. That is BNSF’s longest single-line operating coal route. Powder River Basin coal is mined open-pit and is low sulfur. There are some great RU-vid videos out there on PRB coal trains operating in Northeast Wyoming. Again, thanks for taking us along.

Great Vid. As an Alabama native, I have one small correction for you, McDuffie Terminal in Mobile, AL isn’t a power plant, it’s a place where coal is loaded onto ships for export.

Wow! A tour de force video that sets a new standard. Your shots and angles have always been very good, but you raise the bar in this one with excellent and interesting choices of angles, lighting, focal length, timing, lead-ins, and really great post-production tying everything together with useful and interesting commentary. You've also developed a knack for sequencing the shots with different angles and never staying on the same angle long enough for the viewer's attention to wander. I'd swear you've been doing this for decades, since that kind of skill usual comes from long experience, but you're a natural at this. Also I see you're extending your shooting into a lot more night-time sequences and getting very clean, respectable results. Well done. There's an additional dimension to trains that you're starting to delve into, but is a tricky rabbit-hole, and that's looking more closely at the types of cars and freight the trains are carrying. I saw some really interesting cars on the trains in this video I've not seen before or even heard of, and in one or two cases you do mention what they are, but there are some others I wasn't familiar with on Florida trains. I'll see if I can find them again in the video and try to research them. It's a very long video. There's no right or wrong answer to how to break up a long trip and edit it into videos. I liked what you did with a prior trip, breaking it up into multiple shorter videos, giving me something to look forward to watching next and taking a break between them! Luckily this time for me I had a lot of time to watch it all the way through!

Awesome video, I enjoyed every minute of it! Thank you for visiting my home state of Alabama! Nice music at the end of the video!

Wow, great video and adventure. Parkwood Junction had you 7 miles north of where I railfan.

Amazing video

Wow, what a trip with a lot going on...very cool!

Awesome video as per usual, I really enjoyed this one!! 💯

Excellent presentation Christian. Thanks. 😊

Excellent video

Nice presentation. With a screen name like mines, you know I really like the railroad and watching trains. However, I am very ignorant when it comes to the language and how to actually railfan. It's one of those things I hope to do more of in the next few years. I really enjoyed your footage, especially in the Irondale and Birmingham area. I only live 2 hours away and need to get there more often. It truly is the "Pittsburgh" of the south.

Awesome video. Nice catch of the RF&P heritage unit towards the end, I’m hoping it makes its way up to Western Pa

Fun Fact: 6 UP SD70ms are now in Michigan sporting Lake State Railway colors

Awesome catches!

the train at 9:37 was Ns G89 he runs lite to cobb sliding a few miles south from austell to pick up 28Js / 244s intermodal cut

The train seen at 30:13 is a loaded trash train from the new York area that goes to a landfill in Southern Alabama i believe the symbol is 11t

If you ever go back to GS&F I highly recommend checking out Valdosta. From downtown go a few miles out East on Howell Road to catch them out in the boonies. I recommend going to Lake Park road railroad crossing. They haul through there usually doing 60.

I live about an hour from Birmingham in Huntsville this was an amazing video and if you ever get the chance the ns east end Memphis district runs through my town we have a lot of up and bnsf power come through as well as lots of traffic and our own short line the hmcr

Awesome Catch

The Intermodal with UP power is called out as NS 29S out of NS's Inman Yard in Atlanta Georgia to have the freight handed over to UP's Yard in Shreveport Louisiana. I'm a New Jersey Railfan and I ralilfanned in Both Georgia and Alabama in my opinion Alabama was better we got endless NS, Foreign power and Amtrak power in Irondale and endless NS, CSX, BNSF, and Amtrak trains in Birmingham we had an ultra rare catch on NS 131 I think was it's symbol we saw 2 Savage SD60F's yes that's actually the loco's name LOL was a blast along with catching NS 1066 NYC heritage unit serving as a rear DPU on Eastbound loaded coal train NS 74G out of Parrish, Alabama to Wilsonville, Alabama.

You shpuld take a trip up to Memphis