The Legendary 14009

In our lives, we come across a lot of situations where we might need some time off and engage ourselves in our hobbies to divert our mind away from the stressful world and different people have different hobbies and some are peculiar, like mine, I am crazy about big machines of Railways and Aviation, I feel they have a life too. And, just like any kid would be, even I was awestruck by the huge machines that trains, planes were but unlike most, the love and craze for these machines grew along with me, and I started to click pictures of them and store as a collection whenever I can..

Among them, there are certain rolling stock that are left legendary and tend to seek and get more attention. A Locomotive of class WDM3A based in Locomotive Shed situated in Gooty, which is a small town in Anantapur district of A.P  and Loco Number 14009 is one such rolling stock. Why is this so special? Well, because of the changing requirements of Railways, such rolling stock are becoming rare and unique.

When I first started off chasing trains, I didn't mind about this locomotive, partially because of my adoration towards locos of a different class but as days passed, After my 1st capture of this loco near rajapur in 2016, and realizing the days of this legend were being counted, I was longing to capture this legend before he retires and had chances for that when it was certain train since a couple of days but thank you partly to my laziness and partly due to my miscalculation of place we would be capturing it, I wasn’t able to capture it and later was felt contrite about it. 

the capture of March 2016

But, life has been good in this regard and one fine Sunday morning, as I woke up and was scrolling through whats App group, my eyes got affixed on one message. “14009 with Kachiguda passenger in Short Hood Forward Mode”. I immediately checked the timings of that train, checked local MMTS timings, realized that I had 2 hours in hand to fresh up, and reach the location to capture the legend and I decided, I’m not going to mess it up this time. Freshen up, bagged my camera and set off in an hour, reached my nearest MMTS station, caught the local I planned to, and reached the location as planned. So far so good, I called out to my dear friend, Raheem who stays nearby that location and he too decided to come and capture the legend with me. So, as we kept tracking and we realized the legend is nearing, my excitement grew. In the meantime, the weather suddenly started to become dark, with cloud cover building up, it looked like it’s going to rain but we stayed put for the legend to show up.

As soon as we heard the honk and chugging, we knew the legend arrived in style it’s known for. We got up, Camera-ready, with the settings done and in position with my right pointing finger hovering over the shutter button anxiously waiting for it to show up. No sooner it showed up, half click, focus, wait, check, and click…. Legend captured in my lens!!! Once it was captured, the satisfaction was immense, all the efforts of reaching in time didn’t go waste, it started to rain heavily later on and I was drenched but the happiness in capturing the legend, ONE FOUR ZERO ZERO NINE didn’t make me feel bad for getting drenched…

And the Legend blessed me again