Rainy Day

Photographically, this may not have much to offer, having been taken through a rain-spattered windshield with a camera phone.

But at other levels it may say a lot.

The spot is probably my favorite rainy day trackside lurk. Not far from home, low key. There are better places for sunny days, and photography, so it is trackside, and doing "something different," which ameliorates the rainy day funk a bit.

This stretch often makes me think of other places I have been with similar arrangements. I once paced a steam locomotive (DB class 44 2-10-0, If I remember correctly) hauling a heavy coal train for several miles toward the Luxembourg border near Trier, Germany, in the late dusk along a similar arrangement of raised train track and screening trees. There are also the raised tracks in Tacoma toward Ruston. Many other places, over many years.

I also quietly admire that this is new: the recent double-tracking of the short stretch of single formerly here meant widening the roadbed, so from this angle at least, this is a new embankment, with new box-culverts. Not all change is loss.

Trains may not currently dominate my interests as they have for much of my life, but I still spend some time each week with railway books, be they about British branch lines, German Straßenbahnen, the cement & coal lines of Northeastern Pennsylvania, or whatever. I still go trackside, often to the same stretches of track.

I still enjoy taking pictures, sometimes with the big camera, sometimes with my phone.

Trains are still worth watching, still worth taking pictures of. Rain or sun.