Spring breeze

Looking north from Carkeek Park

Pelicans

I took this picture at Beverly, Washington, roughly 50 years ago, age 13, while on a Boy Scout camping trip nearby. 

This ancient electric locomotive set was waiting to help a Westbound Milwaukee Road train up the Saddle Mountains to Boylston, where the old railroad bridge can still be seen over I-90. These helper locomotives may have cut off at Boylston, or at Kittitas, or may have continued West through the Cedar River Watershed [past the front of the Ed Center] to Tacoma.

The electrics went away after a few years, the railroad a few more years later. The old grade became today's Iron Horse Trail.

Beverly, Lower Crab Creek, and the Missoula Flood areas to the East and North remain one of my favorite areas for daytrips.

Why post this today? Well, I was in the basement looking for a wall map of Germany, and accidentally tipped over a box overflowing with photographs. While picking up the mess, this one caught my eye: For the thirty years I have been returning to the area with family & friends, I have kept thinking that I should find an old picture.

This isn't the picture I was thinking of, but maybe sharing it will make the other one come out of hiding.

Yakima Canyon

Yakima Canyon, near Umtanum

Richmond Beach

Empire Builder, 28 April 2011

[click on image for more 3D viewing options & other 3D images]

3D Streetcars

Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar in 3D [click on image for more 3D viewing options].

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.

Camera Phone

I got a new phone two weeks ago today & have been enjoying many things about it, not least its camera.