The work the
iron demands.
The Seligman Subdivision runs west from Flagstaff through Williams — where the Grand Canyon Railway still departs — and out through Seligman and Hackberry and Kingman to the California border. This is Route 66 country, which means the railroad and the highway share the same geography: the same canyon walls, the same desert towns, the same neon signs that have been burning since the 1940s. The old AT&SF alignment is directly underneath the BNSF iron. You are photographing a palimpsest.
The elevation change from Flagstaff (7,000 ft) to Kingman (3,300 ft) is dramatic and produces dramatic operational consequences — heavy grades, helper operations, long trains working hard in both directions. Westbound loaded manifest trains drag their brakes down the grade from Williams. Eastbound empties climb it. The light in the Hackberry corridor, late afternoon, against the Mojave Sky — when the vintage neon is beginning to glow and the shadows are running long across the caliche — is as photogenic a railroad environment as exists anywhere in the American Southwest.