Sunday, February 15 dawned rainy and cloudy, but this didn't stop my dad and I from collecting all of our railfan gear and loading it into the Suburban.  By 7:15am we were off on the road driving through 3 inches of fresh snow with the destination of the Seattle Line and ultimately Marlin, WA.  It isn't everyday that you get to go to your namesake town and since I have never been to Marlin before we decided that we would just head straight there.  After meeting up with the Seattle line around Waukon we followed it as closely as possible taking various little gravel roads in the process.  Just on the other side of Odessa we took one road which ended up being a dead end after about 3 or 4 miles.  Finally after backtracking to Odessa and a couple more miles of road we reached Marlin, WA around 10:20am.  We arrived at Marlin without seeing a single train on the line but that was soon to change.  

     As we pulled up to a stop near the Railroad station sign of Marlin I got out to look at the signals for eastbound trains.  It was a long ways down the track but it looked dark.  In a couple of seconds I thought I heard a eastbound train approaching but after glancing at the signals they still looked dark.  Pretty soon I knew there was a train coming and it rounded the corner in the distance at the same time I started running back to the car to grab my camera.  It was all I could do just to turn it on, focus and press the shutter button so the shot I got was nothing like I wanted.  Well the train was the M-EVESPO with 25 cars (BNSF 4160, 759, 1113, 812).  After it passed the signal down in the distance I waited to see if it would change.  And sure enough after the train had exited that block the signal turned to yellow, then in a little while it looked like it went dark again.   After using the binoculars it confirmed my suspicion that it was green and that with the naked eye you couldn't tell it was green.

     After setting up for a shot with me next to the sign and the train in the distance we realized that I would be way too small so we quickly changed it so that the train was between the sign posts like the above shot.  After this eastbound empty grain train blasted through (BNSF 4581, 4068) we got back into the car and waited.....and waited.  The next train didn't come for almost 3 hours.   Finally at 1:40pm a set of headlights rounded the curve far down the tracks to the east.  It turned out to be a westbound stack with BNSF 1042 and 7061 (in BN paint).   After shooting him we decided to head back east towards Spokane and home.   Well unfortunately there was another westbound stack train that was following about 15 minutes behind the first.  The road doesn't really follow the tracks between Marlin and Odessa so we just saw the tail end as we came into Odessa.  We opted not to chase it all the 20 miles back to Marlin but instead continue on and hope that we can find another. 

     We didn't see a single thing after that until we arrived at Canby, WA.  We had just rounded the corner into the town (consisting of a couple of grain elevators and like 1 house!) when we spotted yet another westbound stack (BNSF 6840(in BN paint), 4572).  This time we quickly turned around and chased it back to Bluestem, WA where it entered double track.  After he flew by we continued west eventually ending up just a couple miles east of Espanola.  We waited here until 4:15pm when we had to start for home.  Unfortunately nothing came by then and we saw just the tail end of a manifest exiting Cheney, WA.  So the total for the day was 6 trains but missing 2 of them.  Kind of a slow day but still fun.  Keep up the railfanning and see you trackside sometime!!