The camera is located on the east side of the rail corridor through Littleton, CO. It overlooks the line at what whould be approximately milepost 10.2. In addition to the three tracks for normal trains, you'll also see the two tracks for RTD's light rail system on the west (opposite) side. A great many thanks to Mike Keithly for making the location available and getting the appropriate permissions, and well as providing the care and feeding to keep it running. Also thanks to Lee Ryan for his assistance in getting everything installed.

Both major western US railroads share this main line - hence the reason it's known as the Joint Line. Both Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific trains ply these rails. BNSF currently runs about 60-70 percent of the traffic, with Union Pacific running the rest. This line is a major conduit for coal traffic - both loads and empties. BNSF brings coal traffic from the Powder River Basin down this line in its journey to Texas and the southern main lines. They also run a handful of manifest freights, a local or two, and the rare intermodal. Union Pacific runs the usual coal trains, and also a daily set of Pueblo-North Yard and North-Yard manifest trains, known as MNYPU and MPUNY. Also, you'll see one of the Denver-area locals as it travels along the line on Mon-Wed-Fri.

You'll also see the occasional blank image. These are caused by false triggers, and while we're trying to tune it so you don't see many of them, there will always be a few. Sorry, but such is the price of having the machine try to pick out trains rather than a live human being. We're also going to miss trains from time to time for various reasons. It happens.

The system is based on a D-Link DCS-2000 camera wtih an 8mm lens in a weatherproof, climate-controlled outdoor housing. It's mounted on the side of a building and tied back to Mike's internet connection. When it detects motion in certain areas, the camera saves an image, timestamps it, and FTPs it up to charybdis.drgw.net, the main webserver. From there, it's just part of our website, like any other image.

Quite frankly, because it's expensive. Poor little DRGW.Net doesn't have enough bandwidth for more than about two continuous video streams, and that's only if there aren't any webpages being served at the time. Besides, most of us are only interested in seeing the trains go by, not watching empty trackage.

The timeline gives you an idea of what's going on with the camera on a given day. The time is given across the bottom in local (Mountain Daylight/Standard Time). The current hour is shown on the righthand side of the graph. Any tick you see projecting from the top represents some data element. The green ones mark approximate sunrise and sunset times. The little grey ones indicate when the camera was triggered. The big red ones indicate when the backend software has determined that the camera saw a train.

Lucky for you, thanks to the fine folks at RailroadRadio.net, in cooperation with Timothy Tonge of AnythingWeather.com, provide a continuous stream out of Castle Rock, CO, only a few miles south. Usually you'll be able to hear the radios that control this area, though through this particular section, the trackage is CTC-controlled. However, you'll often hear warrants being issues or cleared as trains pass onto ABS and directional running just a few miles south of this point. Information about the area, in addition to the radio streams, are available here.