Railfanning The Sunset Route: Great Power Through Southern Arizona

The first weekend of April finds us along Union Pacific’s Sunset Route between Tacna and Tucson, Arizona. In a 24-hour period we captured quite the variety of trains, some of which have some unique power on the point. The most notable is a heritage duo, as we catch UP 1989 (Rio Grande) and UP 1983 (Western Pacific) leading manifests into and out of Tucson. For me, this is also my first time seeing the two units so this makes this catch even more memorable. Along with this great duo, we also catch Amtrak’s Sunset Limited with two Phase VII P42s leading the eastbound train, another first for myself. During our chase of that we happened to run into UP 7400 (Pink Ribbon unit) and decided to chase that back to Casa Grande, where we would find an ex-Southern Pacific GP60 sitting in a siding. While this unit wasn’t running during our visit, it was still very nice to see. Special thanks to ‪@some_train_guy‬ for filming the pacing shot for me. This video was re-uploaded as I found a few things I wanted to change with the original. Hope you all enjoy :)