Thanks, Rangy, looking forward to see you and I 'll keep folks up on the NWP re-re-opening. I had the good fortune of riding the NWP from the late 60's on and it was rail-fan friendly. I remember one trip in the mid 70's on a cold, snowy early February day. The westman, #81 was carded out of Willits around 6 a.m. but because of the snow, it didn't leave until 1o a.m. The train had 12 SD-9's for power, six on the point and six unit swing helper entrained 85 cars back from the headend. The train was 126 cars of Redwood Empire lumber weighting in at 13,000 tons. Despite the 12" of snow on the ground in Willits and almost two feet at the summit of Ridge at 2000 ft, (Still the highest crossing of the Coast Range) the freight made a steady 9 mph slogging thru the unplowed snow. I was riding the 6th unit. As we came around one of the loops near the top, there was a tree that fallen on the tracks. It was at least 40 feet long and you couldn't see the ends because of the forest of pine trees. The engineer immediately got on the radio and told the conductor that they were going to hit a tree. The conductor said keep going because he said once we stopped they couldn't get the train moving again on the hill. The lead unit hit the tree as and the trunk got stuck in the gap between the snow plow and the coupler! The unit I was hit They pushed the tree until both ends broke off. The train continued down the hill to Redwood Valley where a MOW crew removed the tree. At that point it was only 12 feet long! The roar of 12 SD-9's going up the 3.3% Ridgewood Summit grade was a sound to behold! So it was nice to hear an SD9 in the Canyon last night.