BNSF Front Range Sub. |
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Frequencies Scanned | |||||
Frequency | Stereo Channel | AAR | Use | Description | Dispatcher ID |
161.160 | Left | 70 | Road | Front Range Dispatcher Akron Dispatcher (1) | DS-94 DS-46 |
161.100 | Right | 66 | Road/Yard | Brush Dispatcher (2) 31st Street Yardmaster | DS-87
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161.250 | Left | 76 | Yard | Rennix Yardmaster (Denver) | |
161.490 | Left | 92 | Road | Union Pacific (interchange) | DS-86 |
160.875/160.260 | Left | 51/10 | Road | Great Western Railway | |
Description in Black text indicates normal traffic heard on frequency Description in Blue text indicates traffic heard occasionally when reception is good Notes: 1: The Akron Subdivision that runs from East Brush, Colorado to Mc Cook, Nebraska. 2: The Brush Subdivision runs east/west from Denver to Sterling. This frequency is shared with the 31st Street Yardmaster who can sometimes be heard when radio reception is good.
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Cheyenne, Wyoming is a busy railroad town. Here, the BNSF crosses over the Union Pacific mainline on the west side of town. BNSF 7728 is shown moving north toward the Cheyenne yard.
Platte River Junction is where coal trains leave the main to dump their load at the Rawhide Power Plant. This train has just passed the switch heading north toward Cheyenne.
Wellington is a small town north of Fort Collins. Trains typicaly don't slow down much passing through here. BNSF 7850 leads a southbound Laurel-Denver freight.
Fort Collins is known for it's street trackage. For several miles, the main line shares Mason Street with nothing but paint stripes to separate the trains from the cars.
Here FURX 7263 approaches the College Avenue grade crossing with intermodal train 92 north.
BNSF 5315 runs north on Mason at the Maple Street crossing.
Loveland has an interchange with the Great Western Railway. BNSF 4803 leads it's train south through town.
Niwot is a small town between Longmont and Boulder whenre the tracks run parallel to Highway 119. In this photo, BNSF 7547 is shown heading south after going through the Colorado Highway 52 grade crossing.
Technical stuff:
The "left channel" scanner is a Realistic Pro-2022 using a copper pipe "hentenna" tuned to the AAR frequency band.
The "right channel" scanner is a Realisstic Pro-2022 with a copper pipe super J pole colinear antenna.
The antennas are approx. 25' above ground and 6 miles west of the tracks in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Audio out from the scanner is fed into a Realtek HD Audio card in an eMachines D5039 desktop computer running Windows XP.
What's a hentenna you ask? Here it is before I dragged it up to the attic crawlspace. It is a 1 wavelength loop antenna with a smaller matching section. The dimensions of the outside loop are approximately 37" x 12". The pipes in the middle have an SO-239 connector for attaching the coax feed cable. This antenna has a symmetric, peanut-shell shaped radiation/sensitivity pattern, so it gives a bit of directional gain (2.5-3dB) along the main axis, perpendicular to the plane of the loop. It should be good for receiving signals font and back, while ignoring signals from the sides. The word hentenna is a play on words..."hen" means strange or odd in japanese, in recognition of the inventors, a group of Japanese Hams in the 1970's.