So there I was... booming along in a CH-53E, about 140kts and 300ft or so above a long, arrow-straight stretch of railroad track in the New Mexico desert. I think we were headed to Kirtland AFB at the time...

I was snooping around with the FLIR, seeing what was out there to see, and when I re-caged it forward I picked up a good-sized blob on the FLIR, on the ground. I thought it was a fire at first (we had already seen numerous small brushfires that day, both on the FLIR and the Mark 1 eyeball), but it was dead-on the tracks.

About a minute went by, and the FLIR blob defined itself into several box-shapes with big thermal plumes coming off the top. Hmmmm... railroad track; hot boxy shapes with plumes on the FLIR; starting to pick up cooler rectangles with warmer circles under them, in a line behind the hot ones... "Hey sir, that's a freight train coming at us!" So my pilot looked at the FLIR screen and said "Yup, I think you're right." Then he dumped the nose and put us at about 10ft and 160+kts! At close to 200mph closure rate, it didn't take long to pick-up the train visually.

So we're now head-to-head with a freight train. My pilot popped the nose up at what seemed like the last possible second; the train crew was out on their catwalk waving at us, and I swear I heard the horn blowing. Keep in mind the -53E generates about 130dB in the cabin in-flight, and I was wearing my flight helmet with earplugs as well... Yeah, we were close.