I am wondering where I can find train schedules for the lines in my area. Both see daily trains but not a lot. I want to go rail fanning but i don't want to sit by the tracks for hours without a train.
Amtrak publishes their passenger train schedules.
Freight carriers, while they do have schedules for their trains, don't publish them and they are adjusted on a weekly basis to cover business changes, major track work and a host of other changes to the business service model. Freight railroads are in the business of handling freight in the service of their customers, not creating picture opportunities for railfans.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
All Freight trains run "extra" these days and on no particular schedule. Even under timetable operation the appearance of a train could be off by hours. The timetable says when a particular train "owns" the main line and other trains must make way for it whenever it comes.
Your best bet is to get a scanner or if you can make friends with the station agent down the line, you can call him and ask him. Scanners will likely enough be going bye bye soon enough as radios are moved to digital service. Once there encryption can be as easy as clicking "OK".
Or you can move to Long Island City where trains pass by every five minutes.
ROARING
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
I do not know where you are located, but BNSF is very rail fan friendly. Forget UP, they stink as far as rail fans are concerned.
I'm not a fan of Twitter, but maybe a good use for it would be to have all the railfans on a line Tweet train sightings and direction, so that other fans up the line could have an idea what's headed their way.
Standard North American railfan catch 22....
Most railroads have freight schedules for mainline trains for commercial purposes. They don't govern the movement of the trains, but they do try to stick to them. Unfortunately, "sticking to them" means they can vary a lot from day to day. Good performance would be for 80% of the trains to reach their destination between 4 hours early and 2 hours late. Intermodal trains tend to do better than "box car" trains. Unit trains generally get scheduled on the fly based on customer loading/unloading, so you never know when they're going to run.
There is thing called an "ATCS monitor" which is capable of showing you where trains are on a particular line - provided it uses ATCS spec 20 radio code line communication. You can join the Yahoo ATCS Monitor group that will set you up with the software and show you which lines are covered. Data is fed to the software either from a scanner radio with a special data port or from internet data feeds provided by some of the users. It's not exactly simple to set up and use, but it is really neat once you get it going. Fred Frailey has written about his use of it in his Trains blog and I have the story of one semi-happy "adventure" in my blog (see link below - "not the Crescent" Aug 29, 2012)
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Thanks for the replies guys. I live in Frankfort KY, so the line through town is a short line so not a lot of traffic. The other line is in Lawernceburg KY and that is on the NS Danville to Louisville main line. I have heard that there can be anywhere from 6 to maybe 20 trains a day on that line.
A Yahoo! group I belong to and occasionally monitor often posts "heads-ups" by e-mail or text messages from smart phones, etc., like this one yesterday by the group's owner:
Accordingly, consider joining this similar group:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/KentuckyRailfan/
See also http://www.trainweb.org/kentuckytrains/ and especially http://www.trainweb.org/kentuckytrains/ns_symbols_1st_district.htm#Louisville Sub and http://www.trainweb.org/kentuckytrains/ns_timetable.htm
Also http://www.frograil.com/railroad/ky.php
- Paul North.
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