The camera is located on the east side of the rail corridor at Monument, CO - inside Rob Beyer's house. It overlooks the main, siding, and house track at what whould be approximately milepost 57.7. The camera faces in a southwest direction. Its approximate location can be seen with Google Maps here.

This Joint Line camera is the second iteration of the project. The first was located near the Littleton crossovers, and was taken down in May of 2005 when the location was no longer available. The new location is about halfway down the Monument siding, looking southwest out of Rob Beyer's house. He's been hosting his own live video camera for some time, and on Wednesday, 19-Jul-2006, we moved his original camera to a northbound view, and placed the old Littleton camera on the south window. That camera was deemed unsuitable, and a new one was installed about two weeks later.

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.

You'll also see the occasional blank image. These are caused by false triggers, and while I'm trying to tune it so you don't see many of them, there will always be a few - particularly on windy days. 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 an Axis 210 network camera looking out through Rob's sliding glass door. When it detects motion in certain areas, the camera saves an image, timestamps it, and FTPs it up to DRGW.Net's main webserver. From there, it's just part of our website, like any other image.

Sorting out trains is a bit tougher. The original algorithm looked for long sequences of continuous triggers. The theory was that trains will give continuous bursts of triggers, whereas spurious (non-train) triggers would only happen once in a while. It worked to some small degree, but really it wasn't terribly accurate.

The new train recognition algorithm is based on an interface to ATCS Monitor. It watches for the signals to drop at either end of Monument, and uses that to determine about when a train should come into view. Then it uses the old algorithm to determine how many images it should string together to make a "train". That's also how the J/L camera page knows whether it's a north or southbound freight.

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 timeline 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. The little blue ones coming off the bottom indicate that the ATCS interface detected a train clearing either North or South Monument.

Lucky for you, thanks to the fine folks at RailroadRadio.net, in cooperation with Timothy Tonge of Skyview Weather, there is a continuous scanner stream out of Castle Rock, CO - about 25 miles north of the camera. 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.